Jack’s Mannequin interview

The good news: Jack’s Mannequin lead singer Andrew McMahon wanted to talk with me. The bad news? I was first going to have to watch a documentary that had been filmed in a hospital. But it turns out that Dear Jack, the first-hand footage of Andrew’s year-long and nearly fatal battle with leukemia, was one of the more compelling hours of film I’ve watched.

In our Beatweek interview, Andrew filled me in on why he chose to document his battle, what motivated him to finally release it to the public, and what his plans are for the forthcoming Jack’s Mannequin album, and why he’s getting his old band Something Corporate back together (at least) one more time…

[The interview was initially delayed when Andrew’s father, who was a part of Dear Jack, had to visit the hospital.]

Is your dad doing alright?

Yeah, it was an outpatient procedure, it was nothing in the way of being very serious, but my mom gets nervous in those situations (laughs).

Watching this movie, not only did I end up leaving the movie feeling that I knew you, I also felt like I knew your dad. It was so strange when they came back and said your dad was sick, because I feel like I know the whole McMahon family now.

I know, right? It was kind of like one of the more complicated elements of putting the movie was just knowing the amount of real living that gets done on that camera, you know, you definitely get to know people. But my family were such, in their own way, were such stars in that moment just for pulling me through, I’m glad they’re getting credit where credit’s due, you know?

At the beginning of the film you’re ill, you’re still being diagnosed, you have no idea what’s going on. At what point did you decide “Hey, I should be filming this.”

I had the camera in there I think as early as the very first night that I was in the hospital, just while things were sort of being sorted out. It wasn’t so much I think that I made a conscious decision to film the sickness, as it was just to film period. I had been filming everything, obviously you see a lot of the footage from where the movie goes back to the six or eight months before when I was recording the record and getting the album pressed, and that was really where the whole thing came from, was I was in the process of documenting pretty heavily up to that point. I think when I had found out that I was going to be in the hospital for a little bit, I remember calling my tour manager and being like, can you grab my keyboard and my video camera, just because I knew that I would probably want that in there. And I think really, it became a little bit of a crutch for me in the sense that usually when I’m dealing with things throughout the day I’m sitting at the piano and writing them you know? Unfortunately the condition that being sick left me in, that wasn’t really an option. Even writing in a journal was really taxing to my eyes and giving me headaches and things like that, so the camera really became the most useful place that I could kind of flush out my feelings about what was coming my way at any given moment.

The movie ends in 2006. It’s been years now, you’ve even made a new album since then. Why didn’t you release it til now? Why was this the right time?

If it hadn’t come out when it did, I think I would have just said let’s not put it out, not rehash the past so far down the line, you know? I think frankly, a lot of the reason that there was the wait was putting it together just took a lot of time. For me, the early stages and the early edits were very difficult to watch. In a lot of ways watching the movie would put me right back into not just the headspace, but the first couple times I watched it I woke up the following morning feeling as ill as I’d ever felt, thinking that it had come back, you know, because there was this muscle memory that the video would trigger. So it really took a couple of years of where we’d do an edit and we’d live with it for six months and then we’d do another one and we’d live with it, cause it was really taxing to try to pull the story out of those video tapes and have to relive it. And I think it was when I got back from The Fray tour this summer that I had the record out and felt like I had really kind of purged I think a lot of the more painful parts of that history.

Dear Jack has been out for a couple of months now. I’m sure you’ve heard from people who’ve seen it. What’s the reaction been from people?

I think a lot of the most initial reaction that I got from the movie was sort of in those early days when we were still on the road and touring around and people were seeing it and then seeing me. And there’s been a mix of reactions I think from people who hadn’t really seen the disease on any level, I definitely had a lot of people say that it really informed them a lot and they feel like they have a much greater understanding of what the processes of being a chemotherapy and a transplant patient are like.

And for me I think that was a huge part of the goal was to educate people and to show the humanity behind these types of illnesses, not just specifically leukemia. The reactions that are the most powerful are those that have either seen a family member go through it or have gone through it themselves, and couple people have come up to me and just said “I wish we had seen this before we went out on our journey, to know that there is this very relatable experience that a lot of us go through.”

Going through something like this, does it give you a different take on the whole health care situation than someone who’s never been through what you’ve been through?

Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, I was in a really blessed situation when I got sick. I actually had incidentally had two forms of health care coverage at the time. I had union insurance through the music industry, but I also had my own policy that I remember when I was like nineteen years old and I got signed and it was like “Well you could technically get rid of your one health care coverage and you can use this instead.” And I remember going “Ah, whatever, two couldn’t be bad, right?”, just a passing comment that ended up playing out for me so positively. But I have to say, you sit in that hospital, and I would think to myself often, I remember regularly having the conversation with my family, had I not, even if I just had one insurance like most people do, not even most people, but like people who have insurance do, I would be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt right now just cause I happened to get some freak illness that nobody knows why you get it and it happens to lots of people. It would have put me out. And I do pretty well for myself, but I couldn’t help but think what that effect was gonna be on any number of people, especially because this is a disease that pops up in my age bracket, which is frankly one of the least insured age brackets out there.

So it’s terrifying. I understand that there’s a lot of politics around the idea of health care reform at the moment. I think that we’re really missing the boat as a nation and as a people, not lighting a fire under the asses of our elected officials to say get over the politics, we do need you to reform the health care system. It needs reformed, no matter what your political views, the shit is broke and needs fixed.

I know the next Jack’s Mannequin record is a little ways off, but is there anything you can tell me about it?

I think the great thing about the new music that I’m working on right now is that there’s a level of freedom to it that I just don’t think that I was able to have with [The Glass] Passenger. There was so much, me being a kind of autobiographical writer, but also a writer that feels the need to sort out whatever’s on my mind at the time, it became difficult having this huge elephant in the room when I was doing Passenger. That said, kind of having Passenger and Dear Jack out there, it really kind of in a lot of ways pulled the shackles off or something, and writing has become so much more fluid. I think the record itself will be like a lot of the other things that I do, it’s about what’s going on in the day at hand.

For me it’s about being back home. I’ve been kind of living between Los Angeles and Laguna Beach for the past six months, going back and forth, and getting back into that mode where I’m back by the water, and that’s when I find myself the most stimulated. So definitely writing some relationship songs, writing songs about being a human being in the very tricky time that we’re living in. And I’m having a lot of fun doing it.

The Something Corporate reunion show, that’s official now, right?

Yeah that’s official, we’re doing a show one of the last couple days in March, down there in Orange County.

Are you just going to do one, or do you leave it open ended and see what happens after that?

We’re going to leave it open ended. We’re definitely going to do the one, and that’s all that we’re planning on now. I think we’re gonna leave some things til we see how that day goes, you know what I mean? See how we all feel up on the stage together, and I think once we get through one of them, we’ll make a call on whether or not there will be more.

Learn more at JacksMannequin • iTunes • Dear Jack • MySpace • Facebook