Rob Thomas Album Recommendations: "...Something to Be"

Album Recommendations: ...Something to Be

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Rob Thomas

[#] ...Something to Be (2005)

I heard four different songs from this thing working at Staples.

Reviewed November 10, 2025

Yeah, I can see why some people found Rob Thomas gross at the time. Getting songs about "I don't really wanna be me no more" on a glossy, pressed up DualDisc, the DVD side filled up with photos of and photo shoots with the man and links to his charity (Jesus)—it's either the most amusingly deaf confessional, or someone handed Rob enough Benjamins to dry his tears with. ...Something to Be is effectively Rob's walkabout album of various genre exercises away from Matchbox Twenty. Really, anyone who likes them is going to find something to like about this. Rob's songs were the meat on Matchbox albums, and there's not much that separates, say, "Ever the Same" from "If You're Gone" in practice.

To Rob's credit, he wears a lot of these sounds remarkably well, the oh-so-hip mixture of crashing drum machines ("Lonely No More"), funky horn scuzz ("Streetcorner Symphony"), Lion King grandiosity ("All That I Am", and also, ew), and a peppering of light acoustic guitar balladry in "When the Heartache Ends" and "Problem Girl" purpose-built for scenes in TV shows the world over. It's not musical exploration for the sake of it (though it does make the album a little "what the fuck does it actually sound like"), these arrangements accentuate his push-and-pull pop rock in a way that the lackluster contemporary Matchbox effort More Than You Think You Are dulled. Almost defiantly, grossly commercial, like one big greatest hits album, I suppose if you can sneeze and hits come out, you might as well carry pepper on you.