FRAZER Interview - August 23rd, 2008

Conducted at the Kool Haus Toronto
By Mike Bax
Source

It was a scorcher of a Saturday. McMahon was in town as the main support to Paramore’s Final Riot tour. I pulled up to the Kool Haus at 1:30 in the afternoon, and saw a significant line-up of fans already sitting on the sidewalk awaiting entry. If there’s one thing Paramore have in spades, it’s a dedicated fan base. A quick call into the Warner reps cell - he was stuck on the Gardiner Expressway, and was likely going to be late. I hooked up with Casper, the band’s tour manger, and was escorted backstage to the Kool Haus green room (all decked out with catering deluxe - I was told to help myself, and grabbed a bottle of water). Andrew came forth and sat down beside me. Introductions were made.

I was kind of dreading this interview. I was told I could come down and interview them less than 48 hours prior. I’d played some of the bands music on MySpace, and trumped up a bunch of questions. But I wasn’t really a true-blue Jack’s Mannequin fan, and I always feel like I’m utterly transparent when I’m talking to bands I don’t know much about. Like a big neon sign is flashing behind my head announcing “He knows NOTHING about you – or your band” in flashing pink and blue.

Add to this fact that Andrew almost died from leukemia three years ago (three years ago almost to the month that my dad was re-admitted into hospital to eventually die of the very same leukemia that Andrew bounced back from)… I was unsure about how to dance around that particular topic, and still deliver a decent interview. Luckily for me, Andrew is a very affable fellow. Easy to talk to. Forthright even. He launched right into his stem cell treatments, and just rolled from there. I didn’t even look at my carefully conceived questions - we just blabbed for well past my allotted 10 minutes for the interview.

So, here he is. Andrew from Jack’s Mannequin. It should be noted that Jack’s Mannequin drop a new CD at the end of September called The Glass Passenger. They come back to town on November 13th to play the Opera House.

Mike:
What’s a typical morning for you?

Andrew:
Truthfully between 11:00 and noon. You know what I mean it’s, not, we have these, in the bunks like you pull a curtain and it’s like it’s a cave, it becomes pitch dark. So the combination of late nights—we’ll finish up a show and go out and stuff, and hang out with the fans or hang out together, or just go out with the other bands on tour. Usually by about 3:00 or 4:00 it’s like bed, get your 7 hours, by noon your up.

Mike:
Do you have any plans for tonight? Are you guys just going to hang out somewhere?

Andrew:
You know I’m not really sure. I’m sure we’ll go out. Today is sort of a celebration for me because of the three-year anniversary of my stem cell transplant. So we call it my third birthday. So yeah we’ll probably go and get a few drinks somewhere around town. Last time we were here we played a full house and we went to Stone’s place. He’s the guy who runs the place. He opened it up for this tour so it was just the tour crowd. But I don’t know if that’s on the agenda.

Mike:
There’s a horror movie / comic book convention on right now.

Andrew:
No way.

Mike:
Where there’s a bunch of freakish bands playing. Vendors, I think there’s some celebrities and stuff, horror movies guys, directors, comic book types.

Andrew:
Yeah, yeah. Like Rob Zombie?

Mike:
He was here last year I think. Or the year before. I don’t know who they’ve got this year. I think Wes Craven? My pal’s working it.

Andrew:
That’s awesome dude. That’s cool. Maybe it’s something to check out. Just nasty, horror flicks, I love it. That’s great, classic man.

Mike:
So I’m going to be up front, I don’t know a whole lot about your band. I was asked by a pal of mine who wanted me to check you out. And I liked what I heard online. I’m a big Keane fan and I like piano-driven music. There’s so much music out there.

Andrew:
Yeah, no I hear you dude. It’s hard to keep up on everything. I hear you, I’m the same way.

Mike:
I know you’ve got a new disk that’s ready and being prepped for release over the past few months. You must be pretty excited that’s coming out.

Andrew:
We’ve been working on it for a long time. It’s been, you know because of what today represents that three-year stem cell transplant, you know what I mean? It was like getting rebooted and getting back up and running and then doing a new record. It’s been a labour of love, we’ve definitely been working hard on it. So to have it finally come out is huge. So end of September it’ll stream and yeah we’re out here just getting the wheels turning and getting people fired up with the record and getting ready to go.

Mike:
I wasn’t even really going to touch on the fact that…

Andrew:
Yeah it’s all good. I’m pretty open about it, yeah it’s all good.

Mike:
My dad died of leukemia and I’m very familiar with what you went through. He was too old for a stem cell transplant and the ward that he was in, I just saw so many stories of people trying to overcome…

Andrew:
It’s a brutal disease…

Mike:
And just struggling through it – it’s utterly surreal.

Andrew:
I’m sorry to hear that.

Mike:
He got out of the hospital for a year and a half, so he went in, did his treatment, got out, we had an extra year and a half with him. He was 69, not a young guy. Bonus time, really.

Andrew:
Yeah, and the older you are the harder it is because they can’t give you the same dosages of therapy and all those things. And I was really blessed and really lucky to be able to get the transplant and have my sister be a perfect match. It’s pretty much as good a story as you could get out of a case of leukemia I got. I got really lucky. So you learn a lot sitting there, as I’m sure you did being there.

Mike:
It was a real experience for me to be at his side so much and to be with my family.

Andrew:
And it unites families that’s for sure, it pulls families together, there’s no question about it.

Mike:
It does. I don’t know if he would have gotten out that first time if we weren’t all there just kind of championing him through. Y’know, I think that anybody that would interview you and your band will have some kind of a story about either being touched by (or have a family member who has) cancer.

Andrew:
And that’s what we found, I mean that’s why I’ve spent so much time working on philanthropic efforts towards cancer research and things like that. It’s just because it’s like, just what you said. It’s like as soon as people realize, it’s like oh my God well I have this or I have that. Everybody’s been touched to some degree by it.

Mike:
I went on the Dear Jack Foundation website, that must have come out of your experience.

Andrew:
Absolutely.

Mike:
How did that get started and what’s involved with it?

Andrew:
Well basically, you know as soon as I just started seeing the outpouring from our fans when I got sick—to send flowers and gifts and all those things. It was like wow, as soon as I got well it occurred to me all these people are motivated, you know what I mean and they want to make a difference. So I essentially created a conduit charity where anybody can donate directly to us, we have our license as a non profit, etc. And then we dole out those funds to various different charities like the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the American Cancer Society, Cancer Research Foundation of America. So we don’t actually administer grants or anything like that, we’re just not set up to do it and frankly (pauses) I’m in a band, I’ve got a lot to do. But we kind of work with a handful of charities that do really great work. We’re doing the Leukemia Lymphoma Societies. It’s Leukemia Awareness Month in September and already our kids have raised more than $15,000 for that. Our charity is going to donate $30,000 or $40,000. So I mean you know we’ve been doing our best ever since I got back on my feet. We just try and spend time every year just dedicating ourselves to make a little bit of money and make a bit of difference.

Mike:
Very cool. Now some music questions. As a piano-driven band, what do you think you would say are the challenges that you might experience compared to other bands that maybe are just more focused on doing straight up rock and roll without the pianos involved?

Andrew:
You know I find, there’s obviously logistical aspects of it. I mean like going out on any tour with a baby grand piano is a huge pain in the ass, you know what I mean? So there are logistical aspects. But I mean truthfully I’ve found… it’s like I always grew up playing piano, it’s just what I did, so when I started the band it made sense that I would play the piano, and that was just the way I did it. My first band, Something Corporate, when we were kids we had a motorcycle trailer we strapped an upright piano to the back of it and we’d drive with the Honda or van and bring it to shows with us. You know it’s like, the ultimate downside with that, and especially early days before when there weren’t really a lot of bands doing that, it was us and Ben Folds were pretty much the only two bands on the road that actually played acoustic piano, which was like, you’d show up and you’d definitely get the sceptics. Whatever… and some people would just wouldn’t want to be open to it. But I think I found it set us apart enough that we’d show up on stages where people wouldn’t be inclined to give the opener the time of day and because we were playing a piano, if we pulled off a show and did a good show it would stand out enough that I think it would probably turn more heads. Any downside probably met with a much greater up side, just because having something unique like that has been a good hook for us to get people to pay attention. It wasn’t really why we did it but it’s sort of ended up working out that way.

Mike:
Do you find most of your songs start with you on the keys, tapping something out or do you find some of your songs are more lyric-driven or guitar-driven?

Andrew:
It goes both ways. I mean I only play the piano and I write all the music so I write at the piano so there’s really no song that I’ve ever been a part of that hasn’t really originated in some respect at the piano. The beginning of my process can start just sitting down at the piano looking for melodies and hunting for progressions and things like that or with a great lyric idea or melody that comes to me, and sometimes if you’re not by the piano you’ll develop those ideas as far as you can before you actually get to it. So I mean it’s a lot like writing music, just cause it’s sort of a crap shoot as to how and where you’ll find your inspiration and then how it actually winds up playing out, you know? Having the band and having the resources to record, a lot of times I’ll barely flush an idea out on the piano or I’ll just work it out really simply knowing that it’s not meant to be a piano song as much, you know what I mean? There are the songs where you know that this is going to feature the piano, and then there are songs, it’s like you’re hearing other instrumentation, you’re hearing sort of other ideas and it’s not really about the piano as much and sometimes you’ll go and say I really want to focus on the guitar and stuff, or I really want to focus on the rhythm and you just do production that way.

Mike:
Piano sounds pretty epic though. Like in most songs where I think I like that piano solo. It’s a big sound or it’s like a movie sound.

Andrew:
Yeah it definitely lends itself to, like you said, sort of a cinematic sort of quality. I mean with us, with this band, and on the new record it’s like, my last record because it was sort of more of a solo effort, it was when I kind of broke away from Something Corporate and I just decided to work on my own for a little bit, it was a lot more piano-centric, just because really I was the only one in the studio doing it. Yeah my producer would play guitar and bass, but everything else was really minimalist sort of surrounding the piano. With this I had my band in the studio with me, so we definitely had a little bit more fun just, definitely used the piano but we were focusing I think on a broader spectrum of arrangement and trying to really make it more of a band sound. So there’s songs on this record that are really focused around the piano in some ways more so than other stuff I’ve done. And then there are other songs that it’s like it really takes a back seat to other instrumentation. You know I never want to be like oh I’m just the dude with piano. Now it’s like we’re trying to make cool songs and make arrangements that aren’t just focused around the piano for the sake of the fact that there’s one in the band. It’s like if nothing else I look at it now as like one of a handful of tools that we can use at any given moment for whatever is going to be the best arrangement for the song.

Mike:
During that period, did you actually leave Something Corporate? Is that still a project that you might go back to?

Andrew:
Yeah I think the way I would approach going back to it would probably be a little bit more conservative than say what I’m doing now which is like we’re on the road for a few years, you know we’ve been on the road for the past two years, supporting our last record and getting ready to do the exact same thing for another one. You know Something Corporate were my best friends in high school and my first band, well… my second band really, but a derivation of my first band, you know? And in turn I think we grew up together, we are still like very close friends and I think we all still feel like it would be good to go in and do something, and these great fans and people that we would never want to just forsake completely because we ended up doing other things. But you know, I think at the same time it’s an idea that maybe has outgrown my ambition, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? What I am ambitious towards with Something Corporate is educating people who maybe don’t know about Something Corporate and more than anything I would like to put a project together with those guys to do something that’s really reflective of the ten years we were a band. Go out and support that, do a tour around that. The idea of kind of propping up the history of the band as opposed to really making it so much about the future.

Mike:
Do you still play any tunes from Something Corporate?

Andrew:
Yeah. I mean I don’t do them in the short sets. When we’re doing like 30-45 minute sets, yeah especially with a new record and wanting to play at least one new song from the record before it comes out. But in a headlining sense I’ll do a couple songs usually from the Something Corporate catalogue.

Mike:
How did you wind up, during that time when you split from that project and started writing your own stuff, how did you wind up helping out other bands? It sounded to me like you were with 2 or 3 different bands helping them out before you put out your first Jack’s album and I’m curious a) how that happened and b) would you continue to do that?

Andrew:
Yeah I mean when I split with Something Corporate I was really just looking for anything to, I was in this kind of very prolific creative mind space, it was finally, I’m not saying I was free of the band I was just free of any limitation that having a band creates. When you’re in a band it’s like it’s a democracy and it’s a trade of ideas and that’s what makes a band great. But for me it was like I’d gotten to the point where I wanted to hear a song from start to finish the way I heard it in my head when I started writing it. And Tommy (Lee) and I – we share a manager and he had gotten a copy of Something Corporate’s second record North. And that album had a song called “Me and the Moon,” which is truthfully one of my favourite songs, when I hear songs from my career period, but definitely my favourite with Something Corporate. And Tommy loved this song and I had heard for months, you know like after that album came out, it was like Tommy loved “Me and the Moon,” and I was like “yeah that’s awesome”. And then one day when I was in the studio working on new material, just starting to develop, the early stages of Everything in Transit we were just programming drums and building beats and things like that, it was really just more of a creative whatever, we’ll see what happens with it – I got a call from Tommy and he was like “Dude it’s Tommy Lee.” And it was like “Hey Tommy!” you know what I mean, like are you serious? He’s like “yeah Carl gave me your number, I’m doing this record” and he was working on his record called TommyLand: The Ride it was like his sort of solo thing and he was collaborating with a bunch of different writers and singers and things like that. And he’s like “Dude I have this song and like it means a lot to me. I haven’t been able to finish it, it reminds me a lot of you know ‘Me and the Moon,’ it’s sort of where I got some inspiration. Do you think you’d come and help me work on this track?” I was like “okay I’m getting in my car now man!”You know what I mean? I was like alright guys cancel the session. So I went over there and then he and I just totally clicked. He had the song, and I actually to this day I really love the song. He had this verse and a portion of this chorus written for this song called “Hello, Again.” And I thought it was a great song. It wasn’t something (not knowing Tommy and just knowing just the reputation of Tommy that I’d grown up watching on MTV and hearing about through media sensationalization) expected – our first interaction he’s telling me this really heartfelt story about a dear friend of his who had lost two of his loved ones in a car accident, and that’s who he had written this song about. And like that was my first interaction with Tommy was this very soulful, very heartfelt thing, he said “I just want to make this song so good, it means so much to me.” And I was just like “Dude, I’m fucking I’m in, whatever.” So we started working together and I finished the song, I went home with the song and I rewrote parts of it and came back and we collaborated on it and I sang on it with him and then ended up writing a couple more things for that record, I contributed a song I wrote for the record and then I helped rewrite some of the lyrics on a couple of other things. I really became invested in that project with them and we became good friends during that period of time and then the Jacks thing was sort of at the same time taking shape and it started, okay man maybe we’re going to put this out and then we got a deal for Jacks. And I was like “yo Tommy, I’ve been programming all the drums on this record, it would be awesome to have a live drummer on it. You know I can’t help but think I’ve been in your studio for the past 3 months so can you maybe help me out?” He just jammed out the whole record, he played everything, like in one night. We brought him the whole album, he just came and jammed out. It’s fun - and my most rock and roll sort of connection through the years with Tommy but he’s an awesome dude.

Mike:
Was that hard for your drummer to then step in and say I’ve got to follow in Tommy Lee’s shoes? That’s a BIG pair of boots to put on.

Andrew:
Yes and no. It’s funny actually, when I got sick Jay Mac [McMillan] went and backed up Tommy and played drums for Tommy in his project that he was singing in. You know, my drummer is like whatever, I stand behind my band, they’re the best musicians, some of the best rock and roll musicians I’ve ever come across. So I’m sure in some ways he was like wow Jay Mac is such an impressive drummer I think it was just more like it’s cool. And he’s done that, you know we did a track with Mick Fleetwood last year and Jay Mac is like, I think he knows how good he is and he’s also I think so inclined to sit back and watch these guys work and take from them what he can, just like any of us. It’s like this is the most ego-less kind of band I can imagine working with.

Mike:
The bands that stay together are the most fun.

Andrew:
Yeah they love music and they love all musicians who are bringing something good to the table and rarely would I ever see any – I think two of his tracks are the best on the record and Jay played on two of the tracks on the record. I brought him in like pretty much after the record was done but the label was like oh we need another track, we need another track, and so like “Dark Blue” and the song “La La Lie,” which were two of the biggest fan favourites are Jay Mac playing drums on those. So… he holds his own (smiles).

Mike:
I really like coming in and seeing bands set up. All of the fucking gear is laid out everywhere and I see bikes, sleeping bags, and sometimes I see workout material. You certainly look like you’re in pretty good shape.

Andrew:
I’m doing my best. I’m going to the gym after this.

Mike:
Is that something you factor in every day, like diet and gym and just trying to keep on top of staying healthy?

Andrew:
It’s a balance, you know what I mean? It’s still a rock and roll tour, there’s an element of unhealthy living but I think truthfully like, especially considering what, you know that I got sick while I was in the middle of a tour, you know I try my best. We don’t finish a night and get plastered every other night, you know what I mean? But we’re not saints either. Actually I became a vegetarian during this tour, which is a hard battle to fight. But I try and go to the gym three times a week and work out every morning, push ups and sit ups and do my best to eat out. You’ll have a day where it’s pizza all day and then you’ll have a day like okay I’ve got to tailor it back. You just gotta, you learn to walk a line out here.

Mike:
I don’t, in general, interview a lot of out of shape band members. When I think back on everybody that I’ve talked to, I mean they’re all pretty lean, and they don’t look like they’re eating bad food all the time.

Andrew:
Well it keeps, yeah it depends, from tour to tour it depends. It’s like we’re lucky enough in this tour because it’s a bigger tour, it has a caterer and all that so you a little bit more regularly are able to choose what you eat rather than just having to eat like a deli tray every day. Yeah it’s a part of it so you’ve got to stay in shape to get up there and actually give a good show is hard. And like in this past year alone it’s like I’ve had to really focus cause it took awhile – I got radiated and my lungs shrunk, it’s taken me years to get back to a place where I can actually maintain the level of energy on stage that I did before I was sick. So and that takes work, you have to be willing to wake up in the morning like I said and do your push ups and do your sit ups and go to the gym – we call the gyms when we get into town and say can we come through, and try to work it out for the day. But you’ve got to think of yourself for sure and think of your health. It’s a big deal.

I take a moment to look around here. I was supposed to get 10 minutes with Andrew. The Warner rep was tied up in bad traffic… and the next interview was late.

Mike:
I know you’re on a schedule today…

Andrew:
No it’s all good dude.

Mike:
I’d like to know what you think is the coolest tune for you on your new disk that’s coming out.

Andrew:
There’s a couple. I mean there’s a song called “Annie use Your Telescope,” which I think is like inherently maybe the coolest song, you know what I mean? There’s songs that I think are maybe bigger accomplishments and might even be more musically evolved but that song is like, just from it’s writing to it’s recording, everything about it was very natural. You have these songs that you struggle with and you spend months figuring out how to work it out and make it happen. That was a song that was just like from the second I wrote the first words till it was done, to the second we were in the studio - there was no resistance anywhere. We just charged right down the path and when it was done we were all just like “yeah it sounds so good.” So I have to say that one is pretty cool, it’s a pretty simple song. You don’t have to fight for it sometimes if you appreciate it that much more. There are songs like a song called “Bloodshot” and songs that were real work songs that for me I’ll always carry the element of work when I listen to them. No matter how anybody else listens to it it’s like the point is you put the record together and it should sound effortless and it should sound like you just cranked them all out. The truth is it’s not how it works. And so some songs that maybe are your best songs, and could even be better than anything else you’ve done because you’ve spent all that time, I won’t lie - some of the songs for me are tainted but it takes a little while before you shake off how much went into the actual creation of it, you know. A kind of song like “Annie,” it was like it’s really an evolved piece of music, it’s probably one of the lushest, coolest sounding arrangements, the chorus has this really cool, all fourths, so really like a bizarre eastern or Asian-sounding theme. You know but it came so naturally that I can’t help but love it. You know what I mean.

Mike:
Do you like to meet your audience before you play?

Andrew:
Oh yeah we were parked right outside a bus stop and like waving, or right outside the lot and waving as we go. Every night at the end of the night, I have family in town or my wife comes out or something like that, pretty much every night I’ll sign for anybody who’s waiting at the end of the night. Truthfully I’ve learned to appreciate fans that much more.