Decoy Music Interview - June 13th, 2006

By Kerry C. Williams
Source

Andrew McMahon is the creator of Jack’s Mannequin. He is also known as the voice behind Something Corporate. He is not related to Ed McMahon, who was the show host for Star Search many years ago. What happened to that guy anyways? Did he ever die? Or is he still around? I swear he’s old enough to be my grandparent’s parents.

Andrew is 23 years old, and he’ll be 24 on Sept. 3rd. He’s been playing the piano for 14 years, which means he started when he was nine. He didn’t go to college, because a year after he graduated high school, his band Something Corporate was signed to Drive-Thru. His parents had given him the ultimatum, that if he didn’t get signed a year after high school, he would have to go to college.

Andrew is such a talented musician. His performance blew me away. Literally. If I had seen him perform right before the interview, I wouldn’t have been able to ask him any questions. I would have still been so captivated with his music. This man is a musical genius. And I don’t just call everyone musical genius’. What makes him so awesome you ask? He is so passionate about what he is doing. I don’t know if many of you know this, but a year ago from the date that I interviewed him, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Anyone that overcomes something like leukemia has a new passion for life, which he placed into his music. I truly wish that he continues to bring us some of America’s best music for years to come.

When did you decide to go from Something Corporate to make Jack’s Mannequin?
It wasn’t a day when I made the decision. Really, it just kind of happened organically. What actually happened was that we (Something Corporate) decided to take a break. The band wanted to go on a hiatus for a year, and take time away. It was during that time I was writing songs; I’m constantly writing. I started writing music, and started recording music. I found that if I don’t record it then I generally don’t save it, or it loses its mystique. The song’s start meaning less after a while. I’ll play a song for six months. It loses its meaning; I sort of like to record it right when it’s written. That’s what happened with Jack’s. I wrote a handful of songs over a couple weeks. And we’d get them down real quick so that they had maintained the vibes. And after a while of doing that I thought it sounded awesome and liked it a lot. After I had seven or eight songs recorded it started to sound like a record. So I decided to finish it as if we intended it to be done.


So you just picked up the people to play with you?
My producer and I recorded most of it. We had programmed most of the drums. He played guitar and bass, and I played keyboard and piano and sang. Then once when we had seven or eight songs, and had made the decision to make a full record, well most songs had a day or two to record. We re-tweaked them. We brought Bob in to play the guitar; I was working with Tommy Lee at the time, so he did some of the drums on the record. Then we brought in Jay for the last three songs on the record, who plays with me live. It was pieced together. A hogg-pogge. We just had whoever we could find to play we had play. It didn’t have a lot of intention. We would stand there and wonder who could play a part, and then call them in. It was a very organic way to make a record. We operated out of necessity. It was a weird configuration of making a record. It was an adventure.


What’s the big difference between Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin?
I think that it’s something for someone to answer on the outside than for someone on the inside. For me, its different people playing. (He was friends with SC throughout high school.) We were high school buddies living the American dream. With Jack’s I wanted to make music, and found people along the way who were going to help me. A lot was different about it. We would go in two or three months (with SC) and make a record, but with this I lived my life for a year and a half, and every time something popped into my head I would go record it. It is more of a story in that sense.

His tattoos:
Starry Night painting tattooed with capitalized MUSIC going down his left forearm. On his opposite forearm he has a Japanese artist named Poquosi. (I the writer, probably totally butchered this artist’s name. It’s a Japanese landscape. He definitely modified it to my liking. The landscape was the same, but it wasn’t a sunset. He has a SC on his thumb from his Something Corporate days. He also has a quote from the Herman Hesse book Siddhartha. It says “The river runs everywhere.”

There is a chapter where there is a river, and he helps people across the river, and he is very self actualizing, it’s where he’s found himself, is in these waters. He got them while he was mixing the “Everything in Transit” album.


So about a year ago you found out you had cancer?
Actually, this was the day of my diagnosis.


How did you take that? Some people get really depressed, and it doesn’t seem like you did that.
I think I took it pretty well. There was a time that I got depressed. It was after the stem cell implant. Which is actually pretty common. I caught shingles, which is an awful thing to go through if you have an immune system, but I didn’t have one. It was terrible, and really depressing.


How long after you were diagnosed did you go in for surgery?
A week and a half after the diagnosis I started chemotherapy for a week. I was in the hospital for seven weeks. I got pneumonia along the way, which almost killed me. But luckily I survived that, and I had to put weight back on and get back into shape. I got down to 115 lbs. Right now I weigh 130. 115 is a huge difference from 130. It took me about five to six weeks to recover from the first round of chemo, to get back my weight back up. We had found out I was a candidate for the stem cell transplant. My first round of chemo started June 6th. I got out around the 4th of July. I went back in the beginning and middle of August. Did six days of chemo, four days of radiation, and then did the transplant, then came home.


How long did you take off before you started touring again?
Well, I did my first show, which more of a gathering for friends and family, around the 100 day mark after the transplant. Surviving the first 100 days are the most critical, where the most can go wrong. So we scheduled the concert 100 days after my transplant. I played about once a month after that. Till about March. I started doing shows more regularly in March, and kept tacking on more and more shows on, until about finally it was about April when we went out on our first run. This is our proper tour now. This is a first time that I’m able to be on a committed tour with another band.


The fund-raising/awareness flip-flop organization that you started, when did that happen?
It started a couple weeks after I was sick. We knew that people wanted to make a contribution after I got sick. So we decided to make it easy, so we created the flip-flops. We had the intention to give them a product to those who donate. We thought it would be good for the merchandising on the internet. We haven’t brought them out on tour. We’ll bring them out here in the summer. It goes along with other bands that make charitable contributions, like wrist bands. In the fall, we’ll start some more aggressive charity stuff.


You’ve come over a lot of obstacles, and you are only 23. What do you have planned for in the future?
Stay alive. Do what I do. It’s cool to overcome things, but for me I love to make music, it’s what I love to do. Just, continue to make music that turns me on. That’s my biggest goal.


Would you say that all these challenges would be inspiration, or was it just something that went on in your life?
It’s a pretty loaded scenario. I’ve always written about things going on in my life. So for something life changing to happen, my perspective, not to say it’s so different. But it will affect everything I do. Just like everything. For example, a relationship, a car crash. Anything that you go through that has a huge effect on you, you carry with you. The things we collect over time.


Do you think it’s a miracle that you are still here, or did you know you were going to make it?
A miracle? I think that modern medicine is miraculous. Someone that twenty years ago would have died is alive is a miracle. I don’t consider myself a miracle. I think that the act of being alive is a miracle in itself. We are all hanging on by the skin of our teeth. Every one realizes that life is fragile. It’s easy to become complacent with you’re here, and you woke up today, and you woke up yesterday. So you figure you’ll probably wake up tomorrow. With something like what happened to me last year, you realize that it’s not a guarantee that you’ll wake up today, or you’ll wake up feeling as good as you did yesterday. You try to take advantage of every moment that you have your health and you feel good. I know that sound’s cliché`, but to actually live by that dogma, it’s empowering. I definitely love life more now.


-Thanks to Andrew and Casper for the interview.