Songfacts®:

• Thomas wrote this song, and although he had been married since 1999, he sang from the perspective of someone who has been hurt by previous relationships, and is now afraid to enter a new one for fear of the loneliness he will feel if it ends like all the others.
• Thomas has some hits as a member of Matchbox Twenty and sang on the Santana song "Smooth," but this was his first single as a solo artist. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. >>

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• The music video, directed by Joseph Kahn, is memorable for its special effects, which mimic the twists and turns of a Rubik's Cube. Many of Kahn's other clips experiment with effects, like the morphing clothes and green-screen backdrop in Janet Jackson's "Doesn't Really Matter," the split-screen technique in blink-182's "Always," and the invisible band members in Garbage's "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)."
• Thomas' look and posturing in the video was cribbed from his idol, George Michael. When Thomas set off for a solo career, he patterned it after George Michael's move away from Wham! with his album Faith. The video for the song "Faith" uses the same kind of shots, brooding, sunglasses and dance moves Thomas copied. "My first solo video had pieces of George all over it," he told Billboard. "Some of the shots, the close-up on the boots, the dance, all of it an homage to someone I had admired since I was a pre-teen."
• In 2020 Thomas spoke with Songfacts about the significance of this track: "I feel like 'Lonely No More' stylistically represented a kind of music I liked, which was a hybrid uber-pop song with a rock tinge, but that the Matchbox guys would think, rightfully, was more pop than Matchbox probably wanted to be. It was a way to have my own unique sound and not just a Matchbox album without the band." (Here's our full interview with Rob Thomas.)
• On writing for himself versus writing for Matchbox Twenty: "I don't really think too much about where a song is going to go when I write. My process is just to write all the time and whenever something comes along to see what I have that I love. For Matchbox, the deciding factor is the other three members. If they don't like something, we don't do it."