What Rob Thomas (Still) Can’t Live Without

I’m a little obsessed with it. Like, so much so that I’ve had to go to the dentist twice now because I get pieces of popcorn stuck and it gets all red. And literally, as soon as I get it all cleaned out, I’m gonna take my antibiotics and I’m back to the Skinny Pop. It’s like a healthier candy for me. And honestly, of all the premade popcorns, I just feel like it’s the best tasting one. The ingredients are so simple that sometimes one bag might be a little saltier than another bag. One might taste a little oiler than the other. It just feels like you’re having something natural there.

And I’m a creature of habits, so I have my workout time and then I have my breakfast time and then I have my snack time. And my snack time almost always involves Skinny Pop. If I show up at my record label for a day of interviews, they’ll have some Skinny Pop waiting for me. And I’m straight-up Original, as well. I don’t fuck with all the flavors. I don’t need any more zest. Popcorn is enough from me.

Years ago, my manager got me the first Theragun when it came out. It was a new concept. But it was a beast of a thing. It was so giant and you had to carry it around in its own mini suitcase. It looked like you were carrying around the presidential nuclear football or something. And so fairly recently, they’ve come up with this small triangle one that fits right in the palm of your hand and you can take it everywhere you go. It’s so much more convenient. And I find as I get older and older and older and older and older, live shows start to feel more and more like a sport all the time. Having that kind of thing on hand to help muscle fatigue and those kind of things, it’s really handy. And the convenience of it — making it smaller, but no less powerful.

I almost didn’t put it on the list, because it’s so ubiquitous in everybody’s life. For me, it’s more of a home thing, in lieu of a television in our kitchen. I’m a person who’s always cooking or making stuff. The kitchen is, like for a lot of people, the activity hub of everything. I think with my ADHD, I always need to have something going on while I’m having something else going on.

As soon as I get up, the first thing I wanna do is put on some show that I’m watching or the news or some podcast or something. If you have your earbuds and your iPad, you have literally every way to be entertained since the dawn of civilization, right there at your fingertips. It makes the day go a lot quicker to always have it of running. My wife is the same way. Whatever she’s doing, it’s always there in the background. So it’s for people like us who need to be entertained all the time. And then it’s good to know that in that same place where you’re getting all the information, you can also all of a sudden stop and send some emails while you’re at it. So it’s kind of a one-stop shop. It’s just an amazing thing that in like, 2010, I didn’t even know what this thing was, and now it’s everywhere.

It’s simple. I own 4,000 pairs of sunglasses, I’m sure. But, if I go out for a week or something traveling and doing shows, I just take the Ray-Ban Aviators and throw them in my bag. They go with everything that you could possibly wear. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you put on a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators, you are 25 percent cooler than you were before you put them on. It is scientific fact. I’m not making this up. I saw it in a journal somewhere on my iPad.

I mean, obviously, you get an honorable mention for the Wayfarers. And an honorable mention to the “Boys of Summer” video for bringing those back into fashion, right? But the Aviators never went out of style.

It was an end-of-tour gift from the singer-songwriter Anna Nalick, who was on tour with me. It’s true to its name. It’s a mini guitar. It’s almost ukulele-sized, right? Martin is a company that hand-makes all their guitars, and they make the finest guitars in the world. So this is a handmade guitar. The sound quality is unbelievable.

During the pandemic, I was doing a lot of co-writes Zoom style. But I was also taking my wife to some of her doctor’s appointments. At the time, she was too sick to drive, so I would have to go, and then I would have to sit for an hour and a half or two hours out in the parking lot waiting because you couldn’t go inside. And I could take that little guitar in the car and actually do Zoom writing sessions just sitting in the front seat with the guitar and my iPad. You know, getting the lyrics together and then playing.

If I’m doing a lot of traveling, carrying a guitar around is a pain in the ass. Carrying a smaller guitar and having to have shittier quality is not great. So it’s great having this little guitar that you can carry anywhere you go, but it also sounds so good. There’s a lot of songs in a guitar like that. The only problem is, if I have one too many drinks on the airplane, I will almost always leave it behind and have to have somebody run back and get it for me. It’s an unbelievable little guy. It’s the unsung hero of traveling guitars.

My wife turned me onto it. I’ve since turned my son onto it, and now he won’t use anything else. It used to be that if I was traveling around, I was fine with whatever the hotel had. And then, like 20 years ago or more, I stopped getting hotel rooms and just started living on my bus. Then I was responsible for all of my own stuff.

It doesn’t dry your skin out. And the eucalyptus one smells really good. There’s a eucalyptus and then there’s a non-scented one. I don’t know if you’ve ever used non-scented bodywash, but it’s kind of a freaky experience. There’s something not right about it, right? I think it’s supposed to be a whole-body experience, and it’s not. It kind of feels like diving into a pool where the temperature is exactly the same as the outdoors. It’s like you’re putting nothing on you. So I recommend the eucalyptus. It also makes it smell like a nice spa. As you get older, you have a little more care. It’s always a couple things, like one good facial cleanser, moisturizer, and a good bodywash. It will carry you a really long way. You don’t really need to go crazy with products. But just a couple key ones will make a good difference.

It’s the same kind of thing. It took me forever to find a facial cleanser. Like a lot of people, I would just use soap. And then I didn’t understand why I had eczema and why my skin was always so dried out and blotchy. So finding the right facial wash — especially a moisturizing one for somebody like me, with super-dry skin — something like that really makes a huge difference. You start using it for a week and you start to feel better.

I quit smoking at Christmas, so that’s good. But, you know, I’ll still drink too much and that dries your skin out. I stay up too late. I’m traveling on airplanes all the time. Those things dry skin out. If I get home from a long trip, I’ll come to give my wife a kiss and a hug and she’ll go, “Go wash your face,” and I run out and I wash it up. So it’s also good for my marriage.

I’m traveling all over the place and you get a lot of delays in airports. A lot of times you’re just sitting for hours and hours and hours. And, you know, me and my mates, we just pull out a deck of cards and we start playing rummy or poker. Rummy is my jam, like 500 rummy. I got my son into it. Everybody I know, I try and get them into it because it’s an easy one to learn. We’ve had so many times where it was just me and my tour manager alone in an airport lounge, and then little by little, people start coming in. And we’ve got us and a bunch of strangers all drinking and playing cards together. Cards make friends. Kills time and makes friends. I think you should always have a deck of cards on you. Because you never know when you’re gonna wanna pull it out. And if you have room, throw in a deck of Uno as well. Cards are intimidating for some people, but Uno makes friends all the time.

My son turned me onto these. I grew up in an age of more tapered clothes. And my son is 28, so his whole life, it’s been kind of wider-legged things. And one day, he came in with his pair of sweatpants, and I started coveting them immediately. The thing that surprised me was that he’s like, “Okay, you gotta buy these pants.” But for me — and I’m not a little guy — he’s like, “You have to wear the women’s medium wide-leg sweatpants.” I guess that’s how they run.

It just became one of those things where these are my favorite house pants. I
walk around the house, and they feel luxurious. But then they also became, like, Well, these are my favorite going-to-the-grocery-store pants. And then they became, like, Well, these are my favorite going-to-the-airport pants. How far of a radius I would leave my home in sweatpants just got bigger and bigger and bigger when I started buying these. Because if you throw on a nice jacket and really fun shoes, they become a style staple. They don’t seem just out of comfort. But then little do people understand that you’re wearing the most comfortable pair of pants you’ve ever owned. Probably two hands’ worth of my friends have these just because I rolled up on them with these and the next day they bought these exact same pants.

Especially when you’re traveling around. When I was really young, when you were starting off, you would always dress at the airport like somebody’s taking your picture. You get dressed up because you’d want people to be like, “Hey, is that a rock star? What’s he do?” And then we get older — where I’m at, I’m like, “Well, I actually do do this for a living. I don’t have to prove it to anybody.” So then you start dressing down and down and down. But now I’ve found a happy medium.

I love my Stance socks. I think for years, I never appreciated what a pop of color on your ankle can do for an otherwise drab outfit. If I’m wearing all black, I like to sometimes let the socks do the work. I even posted a story awhile back of my colorful sock drawer. I have my black-and-white sock drawer, and then I have my colorful sock drawer. And it looks like a fucking party. There’s so much joy in that one sock drawer when you open it up. I think it’s something kind of counterintuitive and you get a little scared to wear these bright-pink socks or whatever. Like Nathan Lane said in The Birdcage, a gentleman does want a touch of color.

I do have to say to the Stance socks, I’ve never in my life put on a more comfortable sock. It feels like just the right amount of compression and tightness. It feels form-fitted for your foot and not kinda baggy and loose.
It’s a little hug for your ankles. If you’ve had socks for a while and then one of them starts to quit on you, it’s the worst. You’re down there pulling it up the whole time. Oh, it’s the worst.