No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.8 - "Rest Stop" (Matchbox Twenty)

This has been on my list of pieces to write for an awfully long time now. It was always going to be hard to follow up "Floating In The Forth".

As it happens, though, I listened to both that song and this one last weekend, which seems about a clear a sign from a random, disinterested universe that it might be time to shuffle onward.

So be it. It's kind of a wrench, though, going from a song about the endless dull pull of suicidal ideation to one about getting kicked out of car. That's not really Thomas' fault, though. In fact, while there are other songs from Mad Season that have stronger hooks, "Rest Stop" is almost certainly the one with the most interesting things to say. Flimflammery summed this up as it being the only track on the album that isn't dripping with passive-aggressive "nice guy" grease. It's not hard to see his point - there's barely a song on the album that isn't about how a woman is/has fucking/fucked things up with him, and HOW DARE SHE?

"Rest Stop" isn't just better than what surrounds it, though. It's good on its own terms. A song about a relationship ending because your partner has realised they no longer care about your interiority? Who makes that decision while you sleep beside them, literally trusting them with your life? Who dumps you in such a way that it's you who has to open the door and walk away, wiping drool from your chin and wondering how you crashed from a dream into this? The motor is still running, the chassis is still whole, but this is still a perfect picture of a car crash.

Except that things keep moving. The song quite pointedly has the narrator kicked out three miles from the nearest place to rest. He goes from cruising effortlessly down the freeway to hiking cross-country, but he still has to maintain a pace. The song underlines this with its own momentum. Whether it's the guitar slashes, the stings of strings, or what sounds like the rhythmic fucking of robotic goats, the song has an undeniable propulsion, lurching forwards as our hero's lover recedes.

The hardest thing about a heartbreak is that there's still so much else that needs to be done. You have to spend so much time awake.

B-side (and while I like this version, note how much is lost by ditching the measured propulsion of the original track):