1999Released
4:54

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Interesting facts and trivia about Smooth (feat. Rob Thomas). By Songfacts®.

Rob Thomas from Matchbox Twenty wrote "Smooth" with Itaal Shur, a songwriter and producer who has worked with Jewel, Robi Rosa and Maxwell (co-writing his first hit, "Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder)." Shur told the story in a Songfacts interview: "I was already active in the music business. I had some hit records with Maxwell and I was already touring the world with Groove Collective, so people knew me more in the underground scene, but I wasn't as big as Rob Thomas, of course. My manager at the time told me that Pete Ganbarg, who was working at the time at Arista, he was looking for music for the new Santana record. At the time, I had my own band and was performing a lot around the city. I jumped at it because I grew up with an older brother who hipped me up to classic rock and I always loved Santana. I went up to the office and I wanted to hear what they had first to see what kind of direction they were going for, and when I went up there I heard the Wyclef track, I heard the Dave Matthews track, I heard a couple of other tracks, and I realized there wasn't the kind of track that was, in my opinion, a standard Santana groove like 'Black Magic Woman,' 'Oye Como Va,' 'Evil Ways.' So I went home and wrote this track on guitar with all the arrangements called 'Room One Seven.' It was about this couple that meet after a long time and have a little tryst in the hotel room. I brought it to Arista and they loved the instrumental and they liked parts of the melodies, but they didn't like the lyrics - they thought it was a little too sexual for Santana - so they asked me if I wanted to work with Rob Thomas. I didn't know him; I'd heard a little bit about Matchbox Twenty. He happened to live at the time in Soho very close to me. He came over and he had already written the verses to the instrumental that Arista gave him. I had a chorus that had the same melody: 'Room One Seven on the seventeenth floor. Take the elevator and I'll meet you at the door.' He didn't have a chorus, so before he came, I changed the words around to, 'Give me the ocean, give me the moon, give me something hot to make my body move,' and this turned into the chorus that we all know."

Thomas sang lead on "Smooth," but that wasn't the plan. He had never written a song for someone else before, so he jumped at the chance to write a song with Shur for Santana, figuring it would boost his songwriting bona fides. When they finished it, Thomas suggested George Michael, one of his musical heroes, as the vocalist. Arista Records ended up asking Thomas to do the vocals, and when he did, it was in Michael's style. "If you listen to the melody and the cadence, it's an attempt to emulate his style in so many ways," he told Billboard. When Thomas launched his solo career a few years later, he once again emulated Michael, who also made the transition from a group (Wham!) to a solo artist.

Many of the lyrics are Thomas' ode to his wife, the former Marisol Maldonado, who is Puerto Rican. "My Muñequita" translates to "My Little Doll" in Spanish; Thomas also calls her his "Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa." Marisol appears in the video.

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Smooth (feat. Rob Thomas).
AKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
116BPM

Album

The album Smooth (feat. Rob Thomas) is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Smooth (feat. Rob Thomas).
Columbia/Legacy
(P) 1999 RCA/JIVE Label Group, a unit of Sony Music Entertainment

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