Rob Thomas. (AP file)

TORONTO - Even when critics are being kind to Rob Thomas, he still absorbs a little bit of cruelty.

Rolling Stone lavished a four-star review on the Matchbox 20 singer's recently released second solo effort, "Cradlesongs" - but also opened the notice by proclaiming that "Rob Thomas will never, ever be cool."

A recent MTV blog post ran with the headline "Is it okay to like Rob Thomas?" And New York magazine included Thomas's tune, "Her Diamonds," in its rundown of "song of the summer" candidates, but called him a "mom-rocker" at the same time.

But for what it's worth, the tirelessly friendly Thomas absorbs the barbs, and doesn't feel compelled to push back. In fact, he's totally cool with being uncool.

"I'm 37 - I'm a mom age," Thomas said in a recent interview. "All that really means is I'm making music for people my own age. I'm OK with that.

"If I was 37 and I was making music for teenagers, I would be a little upset. So I'll take mom-rock I guess. I'm OK with that."

Yet it remains a bit of a mystery to Thomas why mainstream rock music - or "meat and potatoes" rock as he calls it - is so inherently uncool, while other pop music doesn't seem to quite face the same stigma.

Nickelback, as one example, remains a commercial juggernaut - their 45-week-old album "Dark Horse" is still in the top 50 in Canada and the United States, according to numbers from Nielsen SoundScan and Billboard - yet the critical reaction to the band has been so poisonous they now refuse to do print interviews.

Thomas, who says he regards Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger as a friend, saw similarly divided reactions to his alt-pop band, Matchbox 20, whose four albums were certified platinum a combined 12 times in Canada.

"I remember when we first started Matchbox 20, on the same record, there was this young, alternative band coming up, then when we started having Top 40 success and it was all downhill from there critically," said Thomas, whose fall tour will make a stop in Vancouver on Wednesday and in Toronto next month.

"So yeah, I think there is a stigma."

Yet, just as he stopped worrying about it, the critical reception has improved.

"Cradlesong" has received an average critical score of 73, according to review aggregator Metacritic. That's a significant step up from 2005's "Something to Be," which averaged a 57 score.

Part of the warmer reception can be chalked up to a respect for Thomas's heart-on-his-sleeve earnestness. Like him or not, it's tough to deny that his trademark growl always arrives with unwavering commitment - in other words, Thomas always means it.

"Her Diamonds" was written for his wife, Marisol Maldonado-Thomas, who suffers from a rare disease that is similar to lupus.

The song feels intimately personal, featuring lines like: "She rubs her eyes, sits down on the bed and starts to cry/ And there's something less about her/ And I don't know what I'm supposed to do/ So I sit down and I cry too."

And yet, Thomas says his goal is always for his lyrics to transcend the personal.

"My wife has an auto-immune disease and me and her deal with that for the last six or seven years," he said. "But at the end of the day, it's really a song about being empathetic, when the person closest to you is going through something and you can't do anything to make it better except to be there for them.

"I think a lot of times my job is to take myself out of the song, and write about something intensely personal but write about the residual emotion of that, like how does that make me feel, because everyone can relate to that.

"If you write about the way something makes you feel, that becomes more universal."

Elsewhere, Thomas writes about mortality on "Getting Late" (he calls it a "happy ditty ... about death"), Sudanese refugees ("Fire on the Mountain") and political facade ("Wonderful").

For the record, the self-described "politics junkie" was thrilled to see the election of U.S. President Barack Obama because he was "just happy to move anywhere to the left of where we were, and get rid of this government rooted in religion."

"It was starting to get really puritanical and weird for a minute there," he said.

And yet, don't expect Thomas's political stance to come across explicitly in his lyrics. Even "Fire on the Mountain," with its stirring depiction of struggle and destruction ("Where do you go when you can't go home?/ How do you drink when there's blood in the water?") isn't a political song per se, he says.

"It's a political situation, or a situation drawn out of politics, but it wasn't a political song," Thomas said. "It is a human song."

So, yes, Thomas will continue to aim for the largest audience possible. And he won't apologize for it.

"Since a long time ago, I've been totally cool with the idea of mainstream music," he said. "I grew up with mainstream music. Radio when I grew up was Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty and Al Green and all that stuff. And so, the idea of making music for the masses means like making music for people like me, and I'm OK with that.

"Sometimes I think when people try and critique you, you're actually like: 'Oh, yeah, that's me. I'm cool with that."'