Imagine this: you’re in a band that’s doing fairly well, about to embark on tour when you decide to go to the doctor because you’re not feeling one hundred percent. What you thought was maybe just a cold turns out to be something more daunting: leukemia.
This is the news that Andrew McMahon, frontman of piano rock sensation Jack’s Mannequin, was given in 2005. Instead of losing hope and accepting a fate of being sick, McMahon fought hard to get well, and since has served as an inspiration for many young adults dealing with cancer.
His music is as powerful as his story. McMahon manages to capture the vigor of life in his songs, finding a way to move even the most stoic of listeners. TVD had the chance to catch up with McMahon before his performance at the House of Blues in Cleveland this past Sunday. Here’s the exclusive on the therapeutic powers of music, his view on love, and the Dear Jack Foundation.
What drew you to the piano?
Its proximity was probably the first thing. There was always a piano in my house growing up. My mother played a little bit of piano as well; she played well, and she had a piano in our house ever since I could remember. I always found myself tinkering and playing as a kid, just kind of bashing around, but I really would try to find little melodies and always mess around with it. Around age 9, there was a combination of events, a death in our family that had a pretty significant impact on me. It was the first time I encountered that.
That coincided with a move to the West Coast for a brief period of time. I had a buddy—one of my first friends out in Pasadena where we were living—and his dad was a bar band kind of piano player, and he taught me a little Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano. Pretty much as soon as I learned that first chord, I found myself going back to the house and writing songs using the chord he had taught me, just sort of moving it around the piano, and singing a song I had wrote for my uncle who had passed away. God, from that moment on, it was probably four to eight hours a day sitting at that piano until someone made me eat dinner or go to sleep.
Which records did you spin growing up?
The records that I remember having in the house that were specifically listened to were The Breakfast Club soundtrack, U2’s Joshua Tree, Grateful Dead American Beauty, Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced, The Doors Waiting for the Sun. Those are the ones I remember inheriting from my brothers and sisters that I really got into. Later in life, probably in the past five to seven years, is when I got my first record player as an adult and started collecting vinyl. Truthfully, a lot of the stuff I started collecting early was the stuff I grew up on. Even now, vinyl’s starting to make its resurgence, and a lot of modern bands are putting out vinyl more regularly now. But it was stuff like a lot of Neil Young albums; I have a lot of the Tom Petty catalog on record, a lot of the Heartbreakers stuff, Police.
One of my favorites that I’ve gotten in recent years was that In Rainbows Radiohead album that came out. That was a pretty cool thing. Arcade Fire Neon Bible album, I got that on vinyl.
I recently got the most amazing vinyl gift ever, which was the re-release of the Smile tapes by the Beach Boys from Brian Wilson with a handwritten note from Brian that says “To Andrew, I hope this makes you smile. Brian Wilson” on Brian Wilson letterhead. I had given a quote about the release and how excited I was in the LA Times, and Melinda, his wife, saw it, and they sent me the album. It showed up in the mail, and I was like, I don’t know if I even want to open this or if I just want to frame it and put it on my wall.
It’s something that for me is just a more sophisticated listening experience. I like to put on vinyl when I’m having a party at the house because it forces a listening experience; you’ve got to pay attention to flip that record. I think that people pay a little more attention when it’s not as passive.
What was the concept behind your new album, People and Things?
I wanted it to be a modern love story and to be truthful to where I was at in my life, not just with my marriage, or the individual relationship in that sense, but some of the deeper relationships that have developed over my life in the past couple of years. There was an instinct and a desire, I think, to address some of the things that got swept under the rug in the years of my recovery and the years that I was writing Glass Passenger.
I think a lot of the past couple years for me have been this reflective game of catch up. There’s a lot that goes on in the course of dealing with what I dealt with. There’s a combination of denial and trauma that you’re working through. You can’t always get right to the moment at hand. I feel like I’m there now, but I feel like it’s been an effort of writing these last two records.
Certainly when I was writing Passenger, it was in those years that I was not only in my recovery, but I also got married in that time. That doesn’t really pop up a lot in that record. Those were particularly trying years not only in my recovery, but they were trying in my relationship—not only in my marriage, but in other relationships.
I felt like this record would be a chance to reflect on that, to be honest about that and clear the deck on some of those early tribulations that were in the process of resolving themselves. I think I wanted this record to be that bookend, that final chapter in what was an otherwise fairly tricky time in my life.
How’d you decide on the band’s name?
I was doing a ton and ton of journaling at the time, and I had sort of been writing options for band names down. And I had always liked the name The Mannequins. I was the only one in the band at the time; I hadn’t even brought these guys in for the record yet. Incidentally, on the same page was a handful of song titles of the early songs that I demoed for the project. One of them was called “Dear Jack,” so I slipped that in, it became Jack’s Mannequin, and went from there.
Who is Jack?
Jack is one of my close friend’s from high school’s little brother. A really sweet kid. I kind of always thought of him as my little brother. I ended up writing him a song when he was in a bit of a spot.
Do you view music as therapy then?
Absolutely. It always has been for me. A combination of therapy and a cataloging of experiences. I definitely have songs where I explore the more imaginative, and will pull from things that are in my life but frame them in a way that is more of a made-up story or something, but I tend to find that I use songs as an expression of the events of the day and how I process them. When I have bigger existential questions, I tend to manifest those attempts to answering in the form of songs.
Let’s talk a little bit about the Dear Jack Foundation. When did you decide that you wanted to begin it?
I would say it was pretty shortly after my diagnosis. There was a real effort by a lot of fans to help support charities and causes that we aligned ourselves with, a lot of outreach, and a lot of people wanted to send gifts and flowers and stuff like that where it just wasn’t really practical for me to be spending my time going through gifts and flowers. I mean, I couldn’t even have flowers when I was in the hospital. So we instead designated a charity that you could donate to in my name. There were a lot of people who were willing and excited to get involved, who expressed interest in doing more for the cause.
As early as 2006 we started working with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society doing their Light the Night walks, and shortly after that, we started the foundation as an effort to take this energy that people had, and rather than have it be fragmented over a lot of different projects and experiences, we could centralize and be stewards of people’s money and help pass it along. At the time, it was mainly focused on leukemia, and since, we’ve refined the message down to young adult cancer, which frankly in thirty years has not seen an improvement in survival rates for 15- to 39-year-olds.
Look at how fundamental that time is in people’s lives. I mean, 15 to 39, that’s when you graduate high school and college, when you get into your first relationships and have kids, when you get into your careers… To see that that’s the age bracket that has the least hope is devastating. That’s what we focus on now.
We’re a small organization, but we’re growing. We just got our 501(c)(3) status, so we’re officially a non-profit as of this year. Just came from Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital downtown today and met with them on some of their initiatives that they’re focusing on for their young adult bracket and hopefully going to do some work with them.
If nothing else, we raise money and spread it around to initiatives like getting young people into camp so they can have some sort of experience away from a hospital, helping subsidize families that don’t have the finances to be at their kid’s bedsides all the time, and getting them gas to travel to and from the hospital, things like that.
These are the organizations we’ve been in a position to align ourselves with. I’d like to be in a position over the next several years to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and make an impact on research because that’s really what we’re lacking right now. In the meantime, we’re just trying to positively impact young adults who are experiencing cancer.
