Metromix Orlando Interview - October 31st, 2008

By By Lindsay Hansen
Source

Nothing fake about Jack's Mannequin

There’s a different setup than what’s usually seen at The Social. A grand piano is in the center of the stage, the drum set arranged to the left of it rather than behind. A Starbucks cup is perched next to the microphone as Jack’s Mannequin’s Andrew McMahon sings to an imaginary crowd during sound check. A line is steadily forming outside of eager fans, the lucky handful who bought their tickets in the three days before the “Hammers and Strings” tour sold out. The tour features a majority of songs from Jack’s new album, “The Glass Passenger,” a stronger, more dynamic compilation that covers a bizarre year for McMahon and the band. After a stem cell transplant due to his diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the tour is in full swing and McMahon stable in his recovery.

What have you been doing for the past couple of years? Since “Everything in Transit,” there’s this new album now. How long did it take to put that together?

Once “Everything in Transit” came out , the day it came out was the day that I got my stem cell transplant, so I spent at least about eight to nine pretty dedicated months just recovering from all of that, and then we got right back on tour after that eight or nine months. We started touring, and we pretty much toured all the way up until now and working our record, trying to get some eyes on it since for that handful of months I wasn’t able to promote it myself. I’d say probably about a year and a half ago or so we started focusing on the new material and kind of while we were coming off tour, we’d be stopping in the studio working on songs and kind of building it in conjunction with promoting the last record. It took probably about two years on and off, but more specifically the last year.

This album, when I heard it, it sounds like it is more mature, a more dynamic kind of sound. Is that what you wanted to do or did it just kind of turn out that way?

I think that the goal when I do any record is to evolve and you know, explore new sounds. I never really feel psyched doing the same things twice. If you listen to the Something Corporate stuff from one record to the next it was always kind of a different sound and I didn’t want Jack’s to be any different because when you go in its like “I already did that” so it’s time for something new. So yeah, I think that with the last record, I knew exactly what I wanted, I was going for this kind of hybrid of modern rock and roll with a poppy Beach Boys influence, and I wanted it to be all upbeat pop songs, you know, in that spirit. With this record, I think, it was more that the songs drove the process. It wasn’t like I was trying to write a certain kind of song; certain songs were trying to write themselves. I think it took so long to put together; I was going through various stages both in my recovery from getting well and then in my life in general, we were just coming off the road and going in between different bands that are different styles of music, so I think that it just apparently turned into a broad spectrum, dynamic album because it covered such a broad and dynamic period of time.

It seems that there’s always some kind of muse behind your music. You always talk about a “her,” a girl, there’s always a name thrown in there, like Madeline and Annie. Are those real people?

They represent real people. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. You find your muses along the way.

Who came up with the idea to let the fans have such an input on how the album was made. Who came up with that idea?

It was more on how it was released rather than how it was made, and a part of it was how long it took to make the record. Our intention was to put the record out over half a year ago and it’s taken this long to actually get it out. It became sort of this thing where there was a lot of early press on it. We had the MTV feature in January of last year. Some people were curious of what was going to come out of me because of the fact that I had gotten sick and because I had always written autobiographically there became this frenzy to know how that would play out musically. Obviously, and especially these days, getting people excited about getting a record is hard enough and because there was a lot of early press we ended up having to finish up and getting ready to release. We were like, “how do we engage people? How do we bring people into this and let them see that there’s a whole world behind the “Glass Passenger”, it’s not just a bunch of songs. The record company and my team collaborated and came up with ideas on how to draw the fans into that world and make them feel a part of it. We tried it with the last album. Jack’s has always been story-oriented and I love the idea that we have the ability and a kind of fan base that gets excited to be a part of the story and being drawn into it. It was definitely an effort, and more than anything a marketing effort.

On your online interview, you said it took a village to make this album. What did you mean by that?

It was a bizarre period of time. I was struggling with my confidence; I was struggling with direction on the record in general. I knew that I had a lot of things inside of me. When I was committing to it a lot of good songs were coming out. There were moments that I think that had I not had this support structure and had my family and my management, and all these people from the time that I started Something Corporate to now ended up being the team around Jack’s Mannequin, including the guys who play with me live, it’s really been a gradual boiling down process. The best people give the most love toward what I do and support what I do in the biggest way; that’s really what I’ve got, you know. The team of people that are there are for the right reasons, they’re there for the long haul, they’ve been wanting to see this thing succeed so I wanted to make that statement that really is referring directly to the fact that throughout what I think was a harder time in recording and finding direction there was this infrastructure in places where I would slip and they’d be like, “Come on buddy, we’ve got you.” It’s hard in this business and I don’t like the record business for that reason because there are so few people you can really trust. For me, the fact that I have people that I can trust and who are really genuinely wanting to see this thing succeed and not cheaply.