Blast Interview - May 4th, 2009

Andrew McMahon talks Jack’s, SoCo and Twilight

By Terri Schwartz
Source

Blast got an opportunity to talk at length with Jack’s Mannequin front man Andrew McMahon about the group’s new album, working with Stephenie Meyer, the Dear Jack Foundation and the future of Something Corporate.

BLAST: Where did the content for The Glass Passenger come from?

ANDREW MCMAHON: Gosh, it was sort of this weird limbo period, to be honest. I was recording a lot of The Glass Passenger while I was touring everything in transit. Obviously it’s no secret that I had fallen ill around the time that Everything In Transit was finished and was coming out. So pretty much it took me several months to kind of recover from that and deal with all the things that went along with that. And then of course you know, I wanted to get back on the road and really make sure that people had heard Everything In Transit, so I started really working that record and touring tons of dates a year to support “Transit,” while kind of concurrently starting to write and record The Glass Passenger. So there was sort of this strange limbo period where I had my hands in a lot of things and was doing a lot and obviously still trying, while my body was bouncing back, I was still sort of dealing with some of the stress and trauma that goes along with, you know, having recovered and gone through what I had dealt with and getting sick, so, that’s where the content came from, in a lot of respects; that sort of inner-personal struggle of trying to find my place in the world after a pretty traumatic event and in a lot of ways trying to use the music to propel me forward and to get me past this.

BLAST: Are you going to continue writing more mature songs or do you prefer writing similar to your earlier, lighter songs?

AM: I was 17, 18 years old when I was in Something Corporate, you know. Obviously by the time we had put it on hiatus I was turning 21 and becoming an adult and all the things that go along with it. I guess mature is a word. I’ve always, since I was nine years old and started writing songs, have written songs about what I’m dealing with at that point in my life. When you’re 17, you’re writing songs about what it’s like to be in love at 17 and what’s really more relevant at 17 than love: getting into relationships and then breaking them off and the pain of that and all that stuff. Not to say that that stuff isn’t very relevant too, but obviously the approach, when you start getting older; now I’m 26, I’ll be 27 in the summer, it’s like … I write songs from the perspective of a 26 year old now, not a 16 year old. So yeah, I think I’ll continue to grow hopefully and continue to write songs that represent who I am, not songs that intentionally hearken back to some old sentiment, I guess.

BLAST: So what are the songs that you’re writing now about?

AM: The songs I’m writing now about … it’s kind of hard to say. I haven’t really gone in and recorded too much. I went into a recording session recently that was kind of groovy. We ran a bunch of old material we had an accumulated over the course of four or five years. Two of the songs very well may make a new record, but those are obviously older tracks. I think now a lot of these songs are sort of angled around love and about relationships, but I think from a very different perspective. I think that in a lot of ways about real love and what goes along with that and what goes along with you know really being committed to someone and something and sort of how that can be idealized, but sometimes that ideal isn’t always the reality and sort of trying to approach that and analyze it from that level which is sort of the first time I’ve really gotten to do that because obviously The Glass Passenger was about something very different.

BLAST: Are you experimenting with any new sounds?

AM: The sounds I find myself gravitating towards now more than ever are really rich, warm and natural sounds. I think the studio for me is always my second home if you consider I tour anywhere from six to 10 months a year. I’ll spend the remaining months in the studio, regardless of whether I’m recording for an album or just trying to work out some new material and stuff. I find myself sort of slowly gravitating away from the more rigid recording structure, not to say avoiding pro-tools all together or things like that, but I think pro-tools have created this safety net for a lot of bands and a lot of artists to not accomplish and not achieve the sounds on their own and I think my perspective, especially after having been on the road for so long, in these past few years playing with a really talented band, I think you’ll find me going into studio recording more live and recording with less effects and you know less processing and all of these things and really kind of focusing on nailing the sounds and nailing the take and really kind of making it about the magic of the take instead of spending months and months and months and month working on the song and working in the effects. I think I’m kind of getting away from that style.

BLAST: You must have had an interesting end to 2008 — you kind of got sucked into Twilight-mania.

AM: Yes I did sort of, didn’t I? (laughs)

BLAST: Tell me a little bit about working with Stephenie Meyer on the making of the “The Resolution” music video.

AM: It was one of these things where I had a friend of mine who had notified me, this is probably months before I got involved with Stephenie, that Stephenie was a fan of Jack’s Mannequin and that she had made reference to Jack’s either on her website or in the thank you’s in one of her books as being an inspiration for a character or whatever, we were on a play list or something like that. I heard this and at that point didn’t really know much about “Twilight” and while it was obviously a huge phenomenon throughout the country and probably the world and what-not, I don’t think it had quite broken the surface yet. As the months wore on, obviously I was sort of realizing how big a deal this whole thing was and about the same time we were searching for video treatments for “The Resolution” and frankly hadn’t really found one that we clicked with. It was sort of a frustrating process and I was trying to kind of sort it out and we started talking; myself and the label, we started talking about, “Is there anything we could do that would be different and cool and clever that might invigorate this process, and maybe it isn’t just going to video treatments, maybe we reach out to the musicians from another band we like or we reach out to film directors or actors or other people we know?,” that sort of thing. In that conversation, I was like, “Well you know, this woman who writes these books that have sold millions of copies is a purported fan of Jack’s Mannequin. Maybe we could reach out to her. She’s an author, I’m sure she could come up with something cool.” And then of course, it was sort of a pipe dream, I guess, in a sense. I mean I wasn’t really thinking of it on the grander scale of how huge she really was. Sure enough, we reached out, and she was like, “Sure, that sounds great,” and she sent in three treatments and we loved one of them and she ended up coming out and co-directing the video for us.

BLAST: How involved was Stephenie in the process of filming the video?

AM: It wasn’t like she was behind the camera, you know, she’s an author. There was this guy named Nobel Jones who is a director and she was on set the whole time, she obviously wrote the treatment, and she and Nobel collaborated quite a bit as far as the execution of her vision and how she wanted it to look. She was definitely there and approving shots and giving her opinion of certain shots as we went along, so she was definitely a part of the production and the directing of the video, sure.

BLAST: When you were making “The Resolution,” were you thinking mermaids?

AM: (laughs) No, and that’s almost why I picked her treatment more than anybody else’s, you know what I mean? Like, especially when I think my story and what people perceive and, frankly, what is a legitimate perception of what that song is about, we started getting a lot of treatments that I think were just very literal, and what I loved about Stephenie’s is that it was creative. I mean, I loved the metaphor, I loved that she made it more sort of this bizarre kind of love story. There’s the water rising and representing the kind of love that you can’t escape sort of thing and there’s the mermaid at the end. The mermaid sort of freaked people out in the treatment, but I was like, “Let her do her thing. She obviously has done well enough for herself; I’ve got a crazy feeling it’s going to be okay.” And I think they nailed it. But was I writing about mermaids? Definitely not.

BLAST: Bands like Muse and Blue October, who Stephenie’s expressed interest in, have written songs for the movies. I know you wrote “Meet Me At My Window” for “Superman Returns.” Would you be interested in doing something like that for the future “Twilight” movies?

AM: Yeah, of course I would. But that’s like one of the biggest trench wars in the entire music business, just people trying to get their artists on future “Twilight”s or things like that, you know. I tend to find, when it comes down to things like that, where it’s just a bloody bath over everybody trying to force their way in the door and figure it out that I tend to shy away from it. But I would love to have a song featured in (”New Moon”), no question. I don’t tend to written from a writing assignment standpoint, I write what I feel in my day-to-day life, and if there’s something from that that inspires the person putting the soundtrack together enough that they want to use it, then god, of course I would be totally honored, you know? Whether or not I’ll go sit down and pen a song with “New Moon” in mind is maybe a different story.

BLAST: The “Dear Jack” documentary is slated to come out this summer. Do you know any more details about its release or what we can expect from it?

AM: I don’t. I’m in a little bit of a transition in my business world and everything period right now where we’re starting to find out and figure out what the best way for that to come out is. It’s sort of just this thing that the people who put the documentary together got anxious and threw a trailer out very early; a lot earlier than I would have liked to have it come out because I wasn’t sure when the movie would be released. I’m not 100 percent still when it will be released and when I do know, obviously we will send out a press release and everyone will find out. For me, it’s a powerful film; it’s something that means a lot to me. It’s also, it’s touchy for me at the same time and I just want to make sure that it’s handled appropriately and it’s not exploited in a strange way, so we’re still trying to find a home for it and the right sort of distribution angle. My hope is that it would come out sometime around (September), I think that would be sort of the most sensible time for it to come out and you know be able to use that sort of pivotal time for fundraising and those things to release the movie and call attention to it.

BLAST: Some Blast readers might not be familiar with your Dear Jack Foundation. Can you just give a little bit of information about its history and what you want to do with its future?

AM: The foundation was basically started when I realized, as I was getting better, that there was still this sort of passion and energy from my fans to be involved and to support my interest in raising money and raising awareness for leukemia and other blood cancers. I had been involved in a charity and cancer research foundation and a couple other charities and it seemed to me with the amount of money we were raising for other charities, that maybe if we got the ball rolling and started our own foundation where essentially we could collect money and distribute that money to various charities that are affecting positive change in the area of cancer and specifically blood cancer. It was something I was passionate about and it would hopefully keep my fans interested so we started the Dear Jack Foundation. It’s been going for two or three years strong now. We raise hundreds of thousands of dollars largely through (events) and walks, we toured in 2006 where we donated all the proceeds. I think it was like $70,000 we were able to donate. Obviously any money I make off the documentary will be donated to the Dear Jack Foundation. That’s the big thing that we have going on. We’re also doing a Jack’s Mannequin show with Macbeth (Footwear) this year, it will come out in the fall. They’re donating 5 percent of their proceeds from the shoe to the Dear Jack Foundation which we’re really excited about. We doing a “Swim” bracelet that will come out on this next headlining run. $2 from every bracelet sold will go towards the foundation. So we’re just starting to try to find even some passive ways — fans buying merch at the merch booth — that a percentage of those proceeds will go to the charity. So, you know, dearjackfoundation.com, the page still has to be updated, it hasn’t been updated in a little bit, but we plan about getting that much more active with it this year and hopefully continuing to raise a good amount of money every year.

BLAST: I know that you’re a big fan of covering songs from bands like Tom Petty and The Verve at your shows. Give me your favorite songs that you like or would like to cover.

AM: We’ve been doing Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” which has been a lot of fun. One that I’d love to bring back, but we’ll see if it happens, is “Changes” by David Bowie. We did that a couple tours back. We just did it a few times. It was pretty cool. I’m trying to think of some of the obscure covers we’ve done. We did “Kids” by MGMT. That was pretty fun. The cover thing is always great. It’s something that usually evolves out of like a sound check or something like that and we’re like, “Hey, let’s give this a shot.” Right now there isn’t a cover on the books just yet. I mean obviously now having two records to play through and an hour and a half a night to get through what is more than an hour and a half of music can be challenging because then you have to wedge covers in and then people get pissed that you didn’t play the song they wanted to hear. Any of the ones I just mentioned will make their way out on this next tour and maybe we’ll have some time to work out a new one, but I haven’t really thought of one just yet.

BLAST: You need to go on tour with someone with a violin again so you can cover “Bittersweet Symphony.”

AM: Did you see that? Where you there for that Yellowcard/Something Corporate event with Sean (Mackin) on stage? That was a lot of fun. I loved doing that one.

BLAST: Originally you had said Jack’s Mannequin was going to be your side project to Something Corporate, but you just came out with Jack’s sophomore album. Is Jack’s Mannequin now your focus and what’s going to happen with Something Corporate?

AM: I mean I think it’s no secret that Jack’s has become my main focus. I’ve been doing it - pretty much breathing it - for 24 hours a day for several years now. I think it’s what I’ll continue to do. Something Corporate: it’s my first band. They’re my dear friends. They’re still my dear friends. I love the dudes to death and I love the music that we created. We definitely got to a point I think where the creative was about to suffer because we weren’t really getting along, to be perfectly honest. We get along a lot better now that we don’t run a business together 24 hours a day and live and eat and sleep and breathe in each others’ company all day long. For me, our kind of democracy is a tough thing. I think that to make really good stuff, you need to have a vision and you need to not have that vision polluted by politics and by fighting and things like that, and frankly that’s what we were starting to arrive at. And that’s I think what happens with most bands and that’s why most bands don’t play for 30 and 40 years, you know what I mean? I think that’s why these reunion tours are such a huge deal, because bands break up eventually, you know? But that said, we intentionally put Something Corporate on hiatus because I think we were mature and we were responsible and we wanted to at least preserve the potential to do something in the future. Do I think that that something will be, you know, will be a world tour and a brand new record and all that, I would probably be lying to say yes. But I think that there’s a chance that we will get together and do some reunion shows and maybe put together a great package of our favorite songs from the past and a bunch of B-sides that we haven’t released and material that people haven’t heard yet. That’s the kind of thing, at least for me, envision of Something Corporate. I mean, you’ll have to ask the other guys what their opinions are but you know, I think in my head I think that’s the most logical and sensible approach to Something Corporate next step.

BLAST: If you do go on a reunion tour, you’ll have to make your way to Boston.

AM: Boston was always good to Something Corporate, so we’ll have to make our way back to play for you guys.

BLAST: Of all the albums, Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin, which are you closest to?

AM: Which album am I closest to? I’d say from some respects Everything In Transit, to be honest. The place that it held in my life at that point, it was really the only thing I had in a lot of ways. I was sort of this free-floating thing at that point. There was so little assurance. Something Corporate had crushed and was so successful and frankly we were probably on our way to the next thing being huge, but instinctually (sic) I think I knew and the rest of the guys knew that if we went and make a record it wasn’t going to be as good because we weren’t getting along. So Everything In Transit was this huge awakening for me. It was like making music with this immense freedom and this ability to just say, “Hey.” It really was just the freest I’ve felt, not just musically but personally. I didn’t care about poor and spending all my money to make the album. It was like, nothing else mattered at that point but just trying to make songs that were fair and representative of what was going on at that time. So in that sense, it sort of was this sort of blistering, idealized period in my life, you know. Frankly, it was a pretty painful and hard time to do this but the underlining current was just: “Music will pull you through. This music is going to stay no matter what.” Obviously everything that transpired during the finishing and release of that record with me getting sick and all the bizarre references throughout the album to hospitals and doctors and sort of this bizarre foreshadowing that existed throughout that record, it was hard not to feel like I was writing my death in that album. I think in a lot of senses, whether I think it’s the best record is maybe a different story, but I think it’s the closest I’ve ever felt to a body of work.

BLAST: When you were coming up with the name Something Corporate, did it ever occur to you it would have the same nickname as the liqueur, Southern Comfort?

AM: Yeah, I mean, well, no. One, no, I had not even thought of it for a second, and frankly, never in our whole life. People used to call us SoCo. It kind of bothered us, because we were like, “What the fuck is that about?” You know what I mean? [laughter] So no, that was just something kids started abbreviating the name and started calling us “SoCo.” That was like a nickname penned by the fans and sort of perpetuated by them which is fine, it’s sort of the way these things go. Sometimes people have their perspective on how they want to address you and that was sort of out of our hands at that point.

BLAST: Your “Set-List Creation” video has become Andrew McMahon-lore by this point in time. When you’re performing, is it very close to the preordained set-list or do you improvise?

AM: Well I mean, yeah, the video’s just hysterical. That has just come back at me more times than any other piece of video or anything that’s been shot. I tend to stick to the set once I’ve written it. From tour to tour, sometimes we play a very similar set; sometimes we change it every night. I have a feeling on this next headliner that the first couple songs might be the same every night, because with the lighting and stuff you want to be able to create a certain intensity when you pay that much money for lighting and all that stuff, but I imagine on this tour just because we have two records worth of material and what not that we are in kind of a unique position to change it up and keep it fresh every night as we travel from show to show. Sometimes if we come out and do an encore, I’ll call out what they call “audibles” and we’ll change the set from there. When we did the small club tour in the fall when the record came out, there were a lot of audibles. We would come out for the encores and a lot of times the encore would end up being 45 minutes because we would just be having fun and we would just be playing whatever in a 500, 600 person club and we would just kind of dick around and have fun. But yeah, generally speaking, once I write the set we stick to it. There’s four other dudes on the stage and sometimes trying to holler out new songs and have everybody change guitars and different tunings and things can be a real pain in the ass.

BLAST: What’s your favorite song from The Glass Passenger to perform?

AM: That’s hard, you know. That’s one of those things that changes since it’s such a new record. I love playing “Crashin.” “Spinning” and “Crashin,” those are really fun live. Hmm, let’s see, what is another good one I’m really digging playing…

BLAST: Well, what is your favorite of all your songs to perform?

AM: God, what is at this point my favorite of all my songs to play? You know, we’ve been opening the set with “Crashin” lately and it’s just such a fun song to start the show off with. It’s got such a vibe and stuff. I’m really enjoying doing that one live. I’m trying to think of everything that we do. It’s funny because I was thinking of this the other day and I actually remember having the answers and now I’m like totally blanking on it. “Bruised” is always a fun one because people kind of go apeshit during that song and that’s always kind of fun to see people reacting on that level to anything. Like I said, it changes from night to night. A lot depends on the audience and their reaction. There will be nights where we do “Caves,” and we’ll do the first half of “Caves” and you can hear a pin drop in the house and it’s super intense and that can be the one. And there are nights where you got to do a song like that or a quiet song where you’re really ready to connect to a crowd and you’re ready to do this thing and all of the sudden you can hear the bartenders throwing old beer bottles into the trash and you’re just like, “Oh shit, there’s no vibe on this at all.” I kind of concede to the audience on that stuff and a lot of times that’s what ends up deciding what is my favorite or not that night.

BLAST: At this point in your life, are you completely sick of hearing about “Konstantine”?

AM: It will always hold a special place in my heart. People say I hate that song because I won’t play it or anything but it’s just like, “No it’s just really long and really slow and really not written for a band to be playing.” We love to have a Something Corporate song most nights on a headliner but, you know at the same time, the problem with “Konstantine” is, as I said, that song might as well have its own zip code or something. “Konstantine” might as well have its own band name. It is what it is. It is this entity unto itself and unfortunately, if I ever play it, I’ll have to play it forever, every night. If it weren’t such a big deal for me to play “Konstantine,” then I probably would play it. But the truth is, as soon as I bring that song out one time, I will never be able to walk through a venue, no matter what band I’m playing with or no matter where I’m at, and not have people chant and cheer for it. I appreciate the fact that people love the song and that it means a lot to them, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to go play a 10 minute ballad from a Something Corporate record every night while I’m on tour with Jack’s Mannequin. That’s why I don’t do it.