For singer-songwriter Rob Thomas, the melody almost always comes first, no matter whether he’s working on a tune for a new solo album or for his longtime band Matchbox Twenty.

“You go fishing and you find a melody,” Thomas says on a recent video call from his tour bus as it barreled across Ohio on the All Night Days Tour in support of his new solo album of the same name. “There’s a certain chord progression that, for some reason that day, sounds really good to you, and it has a certain color and mood and tone that starts to inform the lyric.

“It’s the melody that grabs you the first time,” he says. “The melody is like the hot girl or hot guy at the bar. It’s like the initial attraction that draws you in, makes you want to engage.

“Then the conversation is the lyric. If you’re lucky enough that it has a nice conversation, and you have something in common, and it speaks to you even more, then that song can really become a part of you.”

Put that attractive melody with a good conversation in the lyrics, and sometimes you get a hit record with a personality all its own, he adds.

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“I get excited by this feeling of a melody,” Thomas says. “I also like when the song, this lyric and melody, within its own thing, has a personality. You feel there’s a certain kind of flavor to it just as a whole. It has a color; it has a shape.”

Thomas’s new solo album “All Night Days” arrives on Friday, Sept. 5.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Thomas discussed writing songs for both his band and his solo career, collaborating virtually on songs during the pandemic and contemplating how Matchbook Twenty’s debut album almost didn’t become the 12-times platinum blockbuster it did.

Q: What does the new record reflect about where your interests and inspirations were while making it?

A: I usually don’t know the overall theme of a record until I finish it. I don’t pretend to be a good enough writer to be like, “Oh, I’m gonna go make this record, this is what I want this record to say about me. It’s usually when I feel like I’ve written enough songs to put together what I think is an interesting group of work, then it’s time to make a record.

And then I look back and I listen to this record. This record has an exuberance to it. Like, if you look at the majority of the songs, there’s a lot less sad, maudlin songs and a lot more upbeat joy.

Q: When you were writing the songs for it?

A: There’s a song in there called “I Believe It” that Matchbox started writing in 2012, and then I forgot about. Then in 2020, before everything fell to (bleep), Matchbox was going to go on tour, and I was going to make a solo record. I started making this record, and “Hand In My Hand” was on there and “Hard To Be Happy.” And “Thrill Me” was just getting written.

It was just a constant process. I always feel like I don’t want to die with good songs in my pocket, so if I’m working on something, whatever I’m working on, I try and put my best songs into that. I don’t hold off on them and wait.

Q: “Hard To Be Happy” has an interesting mix of happy music and sad words. Like a party-on-the-beach song, but the party’s a bummer.

A: I was thinking like when Harry Nilsson did “Lime in the Coconut,” that kind of vibe where there was something so silly about it, but with this other message. When we were writing it, me, Todd Clark, and Derek Furman, we’d been writing in a lot of Zoom sessions and everything we were writing was so sad.

We just kept writing ballads, and we were like, “No, we’re gonna come into the session and we’re going to do something upbeat.” We sat there fiddling around, and I was just like, “Man, it’s really hard to be happy, it’s not so easy.” And then we ran from there.

Q: What was it like writing songs online during lockdown and not in an actual studio?

A: I think it was great because writing has always been mostly a solitary thing. I write maybe a song with a producer, or me and some of the Matchbox guys will collaborate on a couple of things. But most of my songs are usually just kind of me.

And during that couple of years where I was writing with other people, I really started to appreciate collaborating. I understood now the power of someone just having an idea that makes the song so much better. It’s a whole other point of view.

No matter how much I learn or how many different ways I go about it, if I just keep writing myself, then I’m always coming from the same well. I start to know my own tricks, and then I get bored because I know where I’m going to go, right? It’s really nice writing with somebody else, and they just do something completely different than I would.

Q: Can you think of an example of that happening on the new songs?

A: “Hard To Be Happy” was a great example of that. The original chorus melody [he sings it] – everything I usually do is much more percussive. And that was all because of Derek. He came up with a line that I never would have thought of in a million years. Then we were like, “Oh, we’ve got to try and make it David Bowie-meets-George Michael.”

Q: “Thrill Me” is another lovely new song, mostly just your voice and acoustic guitar.

A: I had written that chorus some time before, and I just never knew how I wanted to get there. I knew that I wanted that, “You thrill me, rattle and reel me,” I just didn’t have a good verse. So I was writing with Tim Lopez, one of the guys in Plain White Tees. At the time, I had been with my wife for 26 or 27 years at that point, and Tim had just gotten married.

We were these two people looking at relationships. I was looking back on these years, and he’s looking forward to the possibilities. It’s funny, I used to say this is a song for your second wedding, but then I had to clarify that it’s your second wedding to the same person, like, not your second wife. It was a song that really felt it could only be informed by someone who’s kind of been through it. Almost been to the edge of breaking up and got stronger and pulled yourself back together.

It’s like being a musician for 30 years. There’s something amazing about the gift of being someone’s nostalgia, like seeing a song that’s been around for 30 years and what it means to someone. There’s a pride, I think, in looking back on a relationship that long, and all the ways where it could’ve totally got (bleeped) up and somehow did not.

Q: You and Paul Doucette, Kyle Cook and Brian Yale have stayed together in Matchbox for 30 years, which is rare.

A: Yeah, and we still like each other, which is kind of amazing.

Q: What do you attribute that to?

A: I mean, A, I’m out solo right now; that might have something to do with it. We have a fair amount of distance from each other. When we see each other, we’re genuinely happy to see each other again. There were growing pains, especially when I started to go solo, because being the lead singer, if I’m out this summer, it means that they’re not out this summer.

But if we’re all friends, then you can’t stop your friend from doing something that you know makes him happy just because it’s an inconvenience to you. We learned how to talk to each other. Honestly, we’ve never really had a personal argument. Like, we fight about music, we fight about records, and we’ll fight about album covers, but we’ve never had a personal fight or argument.

Q: Matchbox Twenty’s debut, “Yourself or Someone Like You,” eventually sold millions. But hardly anything at first.

A: No, 610 copies the first week. And we didn’t know that wasn’t good! [Laughs] We were like, “Holy (bleep), 600 people have our record now. That’s amazing.”

Q: And then?

A: In Birmingham, this guy Dave Rossi started playing “Push” [on the radio] just because he liked it. That statement says a lot about the time, right? That’s something now that just can’t happen. Now there’s too many algorithms driving everything. But he liked this song and, like, the next week it was the No. 1 song in Birmingham. Atlantic [Records] kind of zeroed in on that and were like, “Let’s give them one more shot with this song.” And then things progressed steadily from that point on.

Q: Those were different times, all right.

A: We were like one of the last batches of bands that did things in the music business essentially the same way that they’ve been doing it since the ’50s, since, like, the first Alan Freed rock and roll shows. You put the band together, you go out, you play shows. Hopefully, a guy from a label is traveling around, and an A&R guy finding new talent discovers you.

It was a very old-school, traditional way of things happening, but it very nearly almost didn’t.

Q: When did you feel more secure about the band and its future?

I don’t think we started to feel secure until the second record [2000’s “Mad Season”] came out. We knew there was going to be a sophomore slump because if you sell 15 million records, your second one is not going to do as well. I think having “Smooth” [a huge hit for Santana on a song Thomas sang and cowrote] was a huge bolster.

We didn’t have a No. 1 single until the second album [with “Bent”]. Then we were like, “OK, come on, come at us.” We knew that we had “If You’re Gone” in the chamber. Then the third record [“More Than You Think You Are”], we’ve got “Unwell,” we’ve got “Bright Lights,” we’ve got “Disease.” We were really hard on ourselves, and I think it paid off.

Q: I’m sure it did. A lot of people would probably just go off and party after the first hit.

A: Oh, we got a little bit of that. But we were always so mindful of each other. Like, if we saw somebody acting like they were getting a little too big for their britches, we’re like, “Oh, look you, rock star!” [He laughs][ It’s hard to pretend that you’re a rock star when you’re hanging out with all of your close friends, because they know you.