It’s easy for Andrew McMahon to feel self-conscious when he listens back to “Everything In Transit,” his 2005 debut album as Jack’s Mannequin. The Orange County-based singer-songwriter visibly cringes a little, remembering how the piano-rock/emo-adjacent concept album chronicled a painful breakup with the woman who would eventually become his wife. (McMahon and Kelly Hansch have been married since 2006.)
“There are funny moments when I think about the words that I wrote — that I love,” McMahon says over Zoom, looking back at the first album he wrote following the dissolution of his breakthrough band, the more pop-punk-leaning Something Corporate. “But I’m also like, ‘Oh my god, you were such a moron.’”
It’s taken some time and a great deal of introspection to look back on “Everything In Transit” and its tightly wound singles like “Holiday From Real” and “The Mixed Tape” with more warmth than anxiety, a growth journey that culminated in McMahon proudly celebrating the album’s 20th anniversary. On Oct. 11, he and the rest of a reunited Jack’s Mannequin (guitarist Bobby “Raw” Anderson, drummer Jay McMillan, bassist Mikey Wagner) will embark on the second leg of their MFEO (Made For Each Other) tour in Los Angeles, revisiting songs from “Everything In Transit” and its two follow-up albums, 2008’s “The Glass Passenger” and 2011’s “People And Things.”
“Part of the reason it’s possible for me to do this is because I spent enough time on the other side of a room from a therapist to find forgiveness for that whole time in my life,” McMahon says. “This was my 20s, and your 20s are about making mistakes and fumbling in the dark to try and find who you are, what you’re meant to do and who you’re meant to be with. Sometimes hearing that laid bare is embarrassing.”
Complicating his memories even further is the 20th anniversary of another milestone, one McMahon’s 22-year-old self never expected to forever associate with his music career. In 2005, on the same day he finished recording “Everything In Transit,” McMahon was admitted to the hospital after complaining of a prolonged sore throat and fatigue. He was soon diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia and underwent chemotherapy and radiation. A few months later, just as the record was hitting shelves, McMahon received a successful stem cell transplant from his sister and was subsequently declared cancer-free. In 2006, McMahon founded the Dear Jack Foundation, a nonprofit that works with adolescents and young adults facing cancer diagnoses. (One dollar from every MFEO ticket sold will be donated to Dear Jack.)
McMahon’s brush with cancer might have been brief, relatively speaking, but the experience continued to haunt him long after he was given the all-clear. He threw himself into the spoils of band life, partying and drinking to excess in an attempt to prove that nothing had really changed. “I was in denial of what it had done to me,” he says of his cancer diagnosis. “There were a lot of years where it was like, ‘How late can we stay out? How much can we drink? This is me reclaiming my life. If I can still party as hard as I did, before I even knew I was sick, then I’m proving something.’ That took a toll at some point, and [it’s] part of the reason why we wound down.”
Jack’s Mannequin officially broke up in 2012, and McMahon continued to write and release music as Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness. He would occasionally break out Jack’s Mannequin songs on tour, but he would not genuinely revisit the project until “Everything In Transit” had its 10th anniversary in 2015. That year, the 10 Years in Transit tour made 10 stops with Jack’s Mannequin playing its landmark debut in full for the first time. This latest anniversary tour, however, feels to McMahon more like an organic result of his being willing to embrace his entire catalog, from Something Corporate up until today. “It was sort of these dominoes falling,” he says. “I finished a Wilderness tour in 2023 [in support of that year’s ‘Tilt at the Wind No More’], and I brought the Something Corporate guys out, and we did a surprise set. That was the first time I was like, ‘I want to get the Something Corporate guys back together.’ Then it just became this natural thing to say, ‘Well, what if I kind of slow walk my way through this musical history now that I’ve got my feet on the ground?’”
Another component to the Jack’s Mannequin reunion is August’s surprise release “Everything In Transit: Strings Attached” EP, which strips down five tracks from the original album with spare, acoustic arrangements while adding in orchestral strings courtesy of Allie Stamler. “It turned into this really vibey, experimental set of sessions,” McMahon says of making the EP. “[Producer] Suzy Shinn, who’s been a collaborator of mine for a lot of years, has this great home studio. We would listen to the songs off the record and go, ‘What can we do that could be fun and different?’… It was a lot like [recording] ‘Transit’ in the way that it was just like, ‘Let’s wake up, play the song and don’t put it out unless it makes us smile.’”
Reimagining older material this way has also made McMahon start to think about what future performances could look and sound like. “I think it opens up a path to doing more shows with orchestras or a [string] quartet,” he says. “The beauty of the last few years of touring, from Wilderness to Something Corporate to Jack’s, has been [realizing how] they’ve all had such a different feel. There’s something fun about getting this far along and being able to experiment with how this shows up live. Finding the through line between all the projects, continuing to reinvent the arrangements of some of my favorite songs of the catalog, and then taking that on the road, would be super fun.”
For the moment, delving into the whole of his catalog on tour — including Something Corporate and Wilderness material — has proved especially healing for McMahon. “As of a few years ago, it was very clear to me that this is what I’ve got to do to figure out what I want to do next,” he says. “It’s been fulfilling to actually see it materialize, because it’s been a long play, doing these last few years of work. I think the beauty is that I don’t know what’s next. That’s what the goal was: to get a picture of where I’ve been, and then go, ‘Ok, now where are you going?’”
Jack’s Mannequin performs Saturday at The Wiltern at 7 p.m.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
