All Night Days, Rob Thomas' first regular solo album since 2019's Chip Tooth Smile, is out now. While the first single, "Hard to Be Happy," is about how being happy is sometimes difficult, Rob says that the album itself isn't a downer.
"It's a very happy album ... mood-wise," he tells ABC Audio. "I think there's just a lot less morose and a lot more kind of hopefulness and optimism, maybe, on this record."
As for the title All Night Days, it comes from one of the album's songs, and Rob was thrilled to have accidentally come up with a phrase that didn't exist before he coined it.
"It was just a conversation that I had with a friend who was talking about, you know, 'Back in the day, when we used to stay out all night,'" he explains. "And I had made an offhand comment -- I just said, 'I think my all night days are over.' And so then ... I started to think about this idea of, like, y'know, your youth is your 'all night days.'"
Ahead of its release, Rob released four songs from the album -- "Hard to Be Happy," "Thrill Me," "Picture Perfect" and "Machine" -- and they all sound pretty different, which he says is deliberate.
"Everything has a different flavor and a different color and a different taste to it," he notes, adding, "Because it's always really been about -- since the last time that I checked in with everyone as a solo artist -- these are the 'best songs' that I've written, I think. They represent all kinds of different genres of music and they represent different kinds of emotions." (AUDIO IS ABC 1-ON-1)
Rob wraps the North American leg of his All Night Days tour Saturday in Inglewood, California; he heads to Australia in October.
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