Nightline Playlist: Rob Thomas

Jan. 12, 2008— -- For Rob Thomas, the lead singer of the rock group Matchbox Twenty, life before his successful music career was difficult.

Born on a U.S. Army base in Landstuhl, Germany, Thomas was shuttled back and forth between his mom's home in Florida and his grandmother's in South Carolina.

Thomas' already tumultuous home life only became more so when he dropped out of high school at the age of 17. Thomas spent three years homeless, drifting from place to place with only one constant in his life: music. He writes his own songs.

"I feel like the process of writing a song is kind of like turning on some sort of radio, and all of these songs are like in the frequency of the air, floating around, and every now and then if you're lucky enough, you hear one," Thomas said. "You hear this melody that hasn't been written yet or hasn't been written down yet. And you sit down and you try to turn that into something physical."

Thomas is the primary songwriter and lead singer of Matchbox Twenty. When he's not writing for the band, he's churning out hits for the likes of Carlos Santana and Willie Nelson. His band has sold more than 37 million albums worldwide. Their first album, "Yourself or Someone Like You" was an instant hit, going gold in 1996.

"When I first started, I was really fortunate to have my first record do really, really well," Thomas said. "And it gave me this opportunity after that to work with Carlos Santana," an experience Thomas said opened a lot of doors for him.

After the success of "Smooth," the single Thomas and Santana co-wrote, Thomas said he was asked to be an outside writer for other artists.

"I was kind of like an anonymous writer on other projects," said Thomas. "When I sit down to an empty page, when I sit down to write a song, my idea, my scope of what the song can be is so much bigger now than it was when all I did was write my own music."

While writing for other artists has expanded his horizons, Thomas said the songs he writes for himself hold the most meaning to him.