Today on the Jukebox, Rob Thomas welcomes you to ’90s Monday…

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Katherine St Asaph: And he went sky diving, he went rocky mountain climbing, he went 2.7 seconds before ripping off fun.
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Will Adams: Rob Thomas is back! And in the interim he’s apparently listened to fun. Like, a lot. And now my enthusiasm has waned.
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Pedro João Santos: Who said the second half of Prism had no impact?
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Tobi Tella: Glad that Rob is feeling like a celebration of life — unfortunate that he also felt the need to celebrate the most generic mom-pop sound out there.
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Katie Gill: Generally speaking, songs about not burning out aren’t that sexy. Growing old can be sexy. Burning out can be sexy! But songs where someone happily sings about the fact that he’s not afraid to be middle aged with Auto-Tune that seems desperate to hide the inevitable cracks in the voice just aren’t sexy. The entire song feels so inoffensive and generic in a middle of the road way that I fully suspect it to be playing in the background of a trailer for a new, inspirational, Book Club or Poms-esque movie tailor-made for an audience of a certain age.
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Taylor Alatorre: This song is so desperate to be described in every review as “life-affirming” that it sanitizes death to the point of becoming a mundane middle-class inconvenience, one that can be readily overcome by drinking whatever glasses of water per day and reading a Wikihow article about networking. Does some nice things with gated drums in the second half, though.
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Alfred Soto: So many friends have “fallen away” — he had not thought death had undone so many. In response, Rob Thomas borrows a vocoder, Mumfordized arrangements leavened with latter-day Arcade Fire and a faint Irish melody, and mythologizes a career that has been a bizzer’s dream since 1996. 
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Micha Cavaseno: Rob Thomas is a staple in my mother’s life. That realm of particular ’90s/early-’00s AOR like Matchbox 20, later Goo Goo Dolls and Train has been a fixture for her in the years of shepherding children and driving across the Tri-State for rapidly approaching 20 years. As a result, I don’t wanna say I like the guy, but I likewise have an ability to recognize him as more than just the “Smooth” meme. Sometimes I play with the idea that Matchbox 20 should be in the “Fake Replacements Canon of the ’90s” I have in my head (thus creating the bizarre mental image of Paul Westerberg jamming on Santana hits). Sometimes I just remember the atrocious music video for “Lonely No More” and wonder how people had no issues with this dude jacking Maroon 5’s (then not so readily mocked) bit. Sometimes like now, I get to hear new songs where he’s decided to emulate .fun and The Lumineers a few years late for an audience who probably are so politely resigned and aged out they could’ve even missed all that! Rob Thomas isn’t going to win my heart with his particular brand of well-crafted blandness, but there’s something fascinating about him being able to keep up — albeit a few too many years behind — when he doesn’t have to, and likewise has an audience who’d let him do so. Thinking about the things that now mean so little to me in retrospect after feeling Of Note for so long, and knowing they’ve slipped before someone who’s learned not to care from the circumstance of having to live so much longer is a better gift than any actual song I’ll get out of the guy who wrote “Real World,” a song even my 8-year-old brain could recognize as THE CORNIEST STUFF EVER. He hasn’t changed, but there’s reasons why that’s good.
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