by kellie abrahamson kabrahamson1@aol.com
Lounging on a dark colored sofa in the backroom of Plush Nightclub sits Andrew McMahon, lead singer of Something Corporate and Jack's Mannequin. He looks right at home, dressed in a white tee shirt, shorts and flip flops, exuding an air of calm despite the fact that in a few hours he will be performing extremely personal songs for hundreds of people. He also looks a little thin, even for a rock star. You see, Andrew McMahon is a cancer survivor. Last year he was diagnosed with Acute Lymphatic Leukemia and after going through chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, here he sits; a little thinner, a little wiser and, most importantly, alive.
"You're a lot more aware of the frailty of your existence, at least your physical existence," Andrew said, explaining how his life has changed since battling leukemia. "In turn I think at times that makes you almost more energized to do more and more and more and at times it makes you more contemplative and more restful and peaceful. I think I have more peace in my life in general now. I think when things spin out of control and get a little crazy, I think I find it easier to step back and go 'oh, wait a minute. It's cool. Here I am, right here. And I'm in it'. I think in that sense those lessons were invaluable."
By the time I had arrived for my interview with Andrew three hours before the doors were scheduled to open, a line of enthusiastic fans had already formed. When the crowd was finally allowed admittance, the line had quadrupled with a steady stream of 20-somethings and teens still coming. These are fans that are used to waiting. The release date for Jack's Mannequin's first album, Everything in Transit, was pushed back twice, once due to the addition of a song that would become their second single "Dark Blue". After much patience, the fans got to hear the album on August 23, 2005, the same day McMahon received his bone marrow transplant from his sister. The album did very well right out of the gate, debuting at #37 on the Billboard 200.
Jack's Mannequin is currently on tour with Copeland, Daphne Loves Derby and The Hush Sound. The 19-city "Tour for the Cure" will benefit the "Dear Jack Foundation," a nonprofit organization McMahon founded to fund cancer research. The tour made it's way to Plush on October 4th. For McMahon, this is a way to give back to those who may be diagnosed in the future and to the medical community that helped save his life.
"I saw an opportunity to go out and raise a ton of money to try and contribute to charities that were funding good research and were having success with advancing protocols and trying to increase survival rates and lengths of remissions and things like that… I just took my opportunity and that's what the foundation is about and that's what this tour has been about and I think largely that'll probably be what a lot of my life will be about going forward; just doing what I can to make sure if somebody has to hear the words that they have cancer that hopefully the next set of words will be 'we know how to fight it'."
A few years back I went to a Dashboard Confessional show and was so impressed by the atmosphere. The audience knew every word and sang them at the top of their lungs and it was this camaraderie I had never seen before or since… That is until Jack's Mannequin took to the stage! Andrew and the rest of the band (which consists of Jon Sullivan on bass, Jacques Brautbar -formerly of Phantom Planet- on guitar and Jay McMillan -formerly of River City High- on drums) had the audience enthralled from beginning to end, performing every song on Everything in Transit and a few extras, including a cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound". Even when the upbeat songs gave way to quiet ballads, the room maintained an energy that was almost electric.
The "Tour for the Cure" comes to an end this week in Sacramento, but their days on the road are not over. Starting November 7th, the band will go on tour with Panic! At the Disco and Bloc Party and will be performing at the UCF Arena in Orlando. Jack's Mannequin is a band that is as good in the studio as they are on stage so if you missed them at Plush, be sure to make the trip to see them next month.
What made you decide to start Jack's Mannequin?
I didn't really like decide to start it, to be honest, it just sort of happened. I don't know, I mean [with] Something Corporate we were all very tired, we were ready to go on a break. There had been discussions of us going in to record another album and I had a good amount of songs written and… we were just at a point in our relationship as a band, at a level of burn out, where we sort of just didn't feel comfortable going into the studio to record and decided to just kind of take as much time off as we needed and take a break… Out of that I continued to write and continued to record as I always do and I think it coincided with a period of time that was extremely prolific and sort of profound as far as the place it holds in the timeline of my life and the songs just took a certain shape… All of a sudden I was sitting with 8 or 9 songs that I felt were very different than anything that I had ever put out with Something Corporate and were very personal and I saw them taking a shape as a story and I kind of going in a direction that wasn't Something Corporate at all and from there I decided to put them out on their own as its own project.
I read that you are always take time to talk to fans after concerts. Based on what you've heard, how have Something Corporate fans reacted to Jack's Mannequin?
There's sort of a philosophy that most bands know to be true which is that your fans always will tell you they like the last thing you did the best. That being said, we've sold more tickets on this tour than we did on the last Something Corporate tour. And the record, without me being able to go out and physically promote it, is rounding the 200,000 mark which as far as albums are concerned is getting right up there with the Something Corporate records. So I don't really know. The reality is this is where I'm going, this is what I'm doing and I love my fans and, like you said, I do everything I can to take time out to spend time with them but I don't write music for them. I write music because I try and create honest art and my hope is, obviously, always, that the people that liked my honest art from the past will like my honest art of the future. But at the same time when you start shackling yourself to perceptions that people have of you from a time of your life that is not now all you can do is try and play catch up or chase your tail. I don't think any real progress comes out of that. But, seemingly they're coming out to the shows, they're singing the words and we're selling a few thousand copies of the record every week, it would appear that's a reflection that people are enjoying it. But I guess I can't say for sure… You know, it's a funny thing. If you look at a Something Corporate audience from the last show Something Corporate played to a Jack's Mannequin audience, the audiences looks totally different. The Something Corporate kids have definitely come along and have stuck with me which has been awesome. But, it's funny with the Jack's Mannequin project… Something Corporate used to be really well known for essentially having a "teeny bopper" kind of audience, which truthfully, never bothered me. The fact is people were coming to see the shows and I was very happy about that and if that was 14 and 15 year old girls then so fucking be it, you know what I mean? But with this record we see almost an even split of guys and girls and almost an even split of high school and college kids which is, as far as albums that I've put out and shows that I've played, it's the most diverse audience that I've played to… Which, largely, was the goal of the project; not to diversify the audience but to make something that was so universal that nobody felt like it was exclusive to any one group or scene or crowd. That a fraternity guy in college could stand next to a freshman high school girl and sing the same words and still have them mean something to both of them and not be ashamed to be in the same room together. The shows have been really cool in that sense.
Beyond the music, you've got a lot of other stuff in the works. I read in your blog you'll be launching a clothing line (River Apparel) and that you're considering writing a book or making a documentary about the last year or two. What's the status of those things?
The clothing line is a wonderful, wonderful concept that I so hope to be launched before Christmas of this year. I will see my first samples tomorrow in New York City. I get on a plane at four this coming morning to go up there and start working on that. I'm also in the process of signing the contracts for this independent label that I'm starting so there's a handful of bands that I've started to work with so that's a whole other thing. And then, yeah, the documentary is sort of luckily one of the things that I've been able to remove myself from in the sense that any movie that you are the subject of I tend to find your much better off letting other peoples opinions steer the boat on that. But, actually, you may be familiar with the band May. One of the members of the band May and one of his close friends started a production company and they are close friends of mine and they approached me… I had a stockpile of home videos that I had taken with my video camera starting at the recording of the Jack's Mannequin process through the beginning of the band into what was the cancer diagnosis and the subsequent fight. So, I film it all… We have been piecing that together over the course of the past year and just submitted the first draft to Sundance and we cross our fingers and are very hopeful for a debut at Sundance this January. There's still a lot more work to be done on it, but the submission draft has gone out so we continue to work on it and we'll submit it to the other festivals as well if Sundance doesn't take it. I think it's going to be cool. I think it's going to be powerful and hopefully it'll be inspiring to a lot of people and a good music movie that has a positive story to it.
What made you decide to start Jack's Mannequin?
I didn't really like decide to start it, to be honest, it just sort of happened. I don't know, I mean [with] Something Corporate we were all very tired, we were ready to go on a break. There had been discussions of us going in to record another album and I had a good amount of songs written and… we were just at a point in our relationship as a band, at a level of burn out, where we sort of just didn't feel comfortable going into the studio to record and decided to just kind of take as much time off as we needed and take a break… Out of that I continued to write and continued to record as I always do and I think it coincided with a period of time that was extremely prolific and sort of profound as far as the place it holds in the timeline of my life and the songs just took a certain shape… All of a sudden I was sitting with 8 or 9 songs that I felt were very different than anything that I had ever put out with Something Corporate and were very personal and I saw them taking a shape as a story and I kind of going in a direction that wasn't Something Corporate at all and from there I decided to put them out on their own as its own project.
What's the story you're telling in "Everything in Transit"?
I guess it's loose in the same way that everybody is living out their own story, you know what I mean? For me it was a period of time where I had come back and was sort of very detached… I think I lost a lot of my identity having spent so much time on tour with, not just four other band mates, but six or seven other crew guys and had done that for three or four years and it becomes easy when you do that without taking a break and never having anytime alone to even know who you are. And I left when I was 18 which is like the kind of crucial years for developing your identity, you know? A lot of the stories are the extremes I went through to access parts of myself that I felt I had lost; that I felt like if I didn't access quickly I might lose forever. I sort of broke ties with, not just my girlfriend, but my family and friends and a lot of people around me and just sort of jumped off the deep end for about a year and half and that's what I wrote about.
Do you think you'll do another concept album in the future?
I don't ever like to attach any expectations or ideas to anything. I didn't write it to be a concept record; it sort of just became one because it ended up mapping out a certain period of time in my life… In that sense I guess it has sort of a concept but it wasn't really like I had this master plan to create it as such. I guess after I had gotten through writing the bulk of it I was like "ok, wow, if I just fill in a few holes all of a sudden this paints a picture." Yeah, I did finish it with that in mind, but I just write songs, you know, and I hope they're good and yeah, it would be great if the next thing I wrote somehow was a continuation of where I left off or took on some sort of shape that made it a unique album experience. I feel like there's a lot that's been lost in modern music, in the actual crafting of the record. It's become a very, not to say "singles driven" market, but I think music has become so… its value has definitely seemed to decrease with the onslaught of how many bands there are out there that sound almost exactly the same. Songs become interchangeable from one band to the next and hopefully what ever I create next will, like the last project, be its own little pop art project; where if you get all the songs at one time and you put them in your stereo it's going to do something for you or create some sort of head space. That's how I like to make records.
Do you write lyrics first or the music first?
Generally speaking it all happens at once. It tends to be that it comes out of a mood or a thought process or something I'm trying to figure out that motivates me to start playing or writing. Often times there's like a lyric or single lyrical idea or thought that spawns a writing session. But I generally kind of write at the piano at least for the bulk of the song. Sit down and just sort of play piano and sing and bounce melodies and progressions and words off of each other until they sort of make sense. Sometimes it comes really easy, sometimes not as easy.
How do you decide which band you're writing for?
It's never really been an issue like that. When Something Corporate took a break I just wrote a recorded and everything I wrote and recorded was going to be put out with this project. At this point the same philosophy is true. There aren't any plans to do a Something Corporate record right now. I'm sure eventually there will be, but as it is this is the band I've been working on and sort of where my heart is, so it's not really a decision making process. I just write and record and hopefully when it's all said and done I get to put it out as a record.
I read that you are always take time to talk to fans after concerts. Based on what you've heard, how have Something Corporate fans reacted to Jack's Mannequin?
There's sort of a philosophy that most bands know to be true which is that your fans always will tell you they like the last thing you did the best. That being said, we've sold more tickets on this tour than we did on the last Something Corporate tour. And the record, without me being able to go out and physically promote it, is rounding the 200,000 mark which as far as albums are concerned is getting right up there with the Something Corporate records. So I don't really know. The reality is this is where I'm going, this is what I'm doing and I love my fans and, like you said, I do everything I can to take time out to spend time with them but I don't write music for them. I write music because I try and create honest art and my hope is, obviously, always, that the people that liked my honest art from the past will like my honest art of the future. But at the same time when you start shackling yourself to perceptions that people have of you from a time of your life that is not now all you can do is try and play catch up or chase your tail. I don't think any real progress comes out of that. But, seemingly they're coming out to the shows, they're singing the words and we're selling a few thousand copies of the record every week, it would appear that's a reflection that people are enjoying it. But I guess I can't say for sure… You know, it's a funny thing. If you look at a Something Corporate audience from the last show Something Corporate played to a Jack's Mannequin audience, the audiences looks totally different. The Something Corporate kids have definitely come along and have stuck with me which has been awesome. But, it's funny with the Jack's Mannequin project… Something Corporate used to be really well known for essentially having a "teeny bopper" kind of audience, which truthfully, never bothered me. The fact is people were coming to see the shows and I was very happy about that and if that was 14 and 15 year old girls then so fucking be it, you know what I mean? But with this record we see almost an even split of guys and girls and almost an even split of high school and college kids which is, as far as albums that I've put out and shows that I've played, it's the most diverse audience that I've played to… Which, largely, was the goal of the project; not to diversify the audience but to make something that was so universal that nobody felt like it was exclusive to any one group or scene or crowd. That a fraternity guy in college could stand next to a freshman high school girl and sing the same words and still have them mean something to both of them and not be ashamed to be in the same room together. The shows have been really cool in that sense.
I have to say, it was extremely inspiring to read your blog entries from the past year and a half. It seems like you remained extremely positive throughout the entire ordeal. Can you tell me a little bit about this tour and the Dear Jack Foundation?
I think you'll find with a lot of cancer survivors it sort of becomes a very immediate instinct, once you've gotten through to the other side… that makes you want to change what it is that put you where you were, just because this is [the kind of] trauma that you don't wish for anybody. And I saw an opportunity to go out and raise a ton of money to try and contribute to charities that were funding good research and were having success with advancing protocols and trying to increase survival rates and lengths of remissions and things like that… I just took my opportunity and that's what the foundation is about and that's what this tour has been about and I think largely that'll probably be what a lot of my life will be about going forward; just doing what I can to make sure if somebody has to hear the words that they have cancer that hopefully the next set of words will be "we know how to fight it." There are a lot of cancers that they do know how to fight and have great success rates. Leukemia for children has a great success rate but unfortunately for people in my age bracket most of the kids that I've encountered who have dealt with the same thing that I've dealt with aren't here anymore or might not be soon and that's something I feel a personal obligation to change.
Was music a large part of your recovery?
I think the motivation to get back to music was. Songs themselves and things like that. I think everybody had this image of me in a hospital room crafting some amazing piece of work because I was so… your hands don't work, your head hurts, you're sick, you don't want to leave the bed. Yeah, sometimes I would turn on some music to try and make it a little bit easier but the reality was I pretty much stared at a TV for six months and fought my ass off. But knowing that I had a record that I loved, that really was what I considered… sort of my one truly complete piece of art that I'd ever made that still had not been promoted other than what the label had done but I'd been completely excluded from... Knowing that was a huge part of my recovery because I pushed the shit out of myself to get to a level where I could physically be a part of the promotion of the album.
How has your life changed since battling Leukemia?
I don't know. Perspective shifts. You do your best to not get caught up in the minutia of the day a little bit more. I think you have a little more reverence to the fact that all of that stuff at the end of the day pales in comparison to physically actually being here... I mean a lot has changed and a lot is very much the same. It's sort of hard to even put your finger on it really except to say that you're a lot more aware of the frailty of your existence, at least your physical existence, and in turn I think at times that makes you almost more energized to do more and more and more and at times it makes you more contemplative and more restful and peaceful. I think I have more peace in my life in general now. I think when things spin out of control and get a little crazy, I think I find it easier to step back and go "oh, wait a minute. It's cool. Here I am, right here. And I'm in it". I think in that sense those lessons were invaluable.
Beyond the music, you've got a lot of other stuff in the works. I read in your blog you'll be launching a clothing line (River Apparel) and that you're considering writing a book or making a documentary about the last year or two. What's the status of those things?
The clothing line is a wonderful, wonderful concept that I so hope to be launched before Christmas of this year. I will see my first samples tomorrow in New York City. I get on a plane at four this coming morning to go up there and start working on that. I'm also in the process of signing the contracts for this independent label that I'm starting so there's a handful of bands that I've started to work with so that's a whole other thing. And then, yeah, the documentary is sort of luckily one of the things that I've been able to remove myself from in the sense that any movie that you are the subject of I tend to find your much better off letting other peoples opinions steer the boat on that. But, actually, you may be familiar with the band May. One of the members of the band May and one of his close friends started a production company and they are close friends of mine and they approached me… I had a stockpile of home videos that I had taken with my video camera starting at the recording of the Jack's Mannequin process through the beginning of the band into what was the cancer diagnosis and the subsequent fight. So, I film it all… We have been piecing that together over the course of the past year and just submitted the first draft to Sundance and we cross our fingers and are very hopeful for a debut at Sundance this January. There's still a lot more work to be done on it, but the submission draft has gone out so we continue to work on it and we'll submit it to the other festivals as well if Sundance doesn't take it. I think it's going to be cool. I think it's going to be powerful and hopefully it'll be inspiring to a lot of people and a good music movie that has a positive story to it.
What's your favorite song to perform live?
I love doing the covers. We've been doing a Simon and Garfunkel cover of "Homeward Bound" which has been a lot of fun every night. The covers are always to me the most fun because it's a chance to step away from your catalogue and try and do justice to someone else's songs.
What was the first concert you remember going to?
The first concert I ever went to was Billy Joel in Cleveland.
When did you know you wanted to be a musician?
Probably the first time I sat down at a piano and wrote a song which would have been when I was about 9 years old.
What do you do with your spare time?
I don't have any! I don't, I really don't. In my spare time I try and write music.
Favorite TV shows?
Entourage or Curb Your Enthusiasm, Big Love, all the HBO stuff. Arrested Development.
Favorite films?
I just saw Little Miss Sunshine. That was probably my favorite modern movie that's come out. My favorite movie of all time would have to be a tie between The Big Lebowski and The Royal Tennenbaums.
What's next for you?
It's just all happening at once. The Panic! At the Disco tour is what's next for Jack's.
So no plans to record any time soon with either band?
I record every time I'm home I generally record by myself just because I sort of find solace in that and I go from there. Ill be recording on and off throughout the year until hopefully I've got a collection of songs that's worth putting out again.
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