Andrew McMahon Announces Jack’s Mannequin 20th Anniversary Tour

It’s about to be a holiday from real: Jack’s Mannequin is back. Singer Andrew McMahon has announced the band’s first full-length U.S. tour in 10 years. The Made for Each Other Tour will kick off in Portland, Maine on June 4, traversing nearly 30 cities across two legs in the summer and fall. The news comes after Jack’s Mannequin appeared on festival lineups for When We Were Young, Bonnaroo, and SXSW.

The tour will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Jack’s Mannequin, which McMahon started as a solo project after his band Something Corporate went on hiatus. He later expanded the project into a full band with Jay McMillan on drums, Bobby Anderson on guitar, and Mikey Wagner on bass. The tour will span all three Jack’s Mannequin albums, starting with Everything in Transit, which was released in 2005 just as McMahon was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. (One dollar from each ticket sale will be donated to McMahon’s Dear Jack Foundation.)

While he has continued to sing select Jack’s Mannequin songs under his latest stage name, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, the Made for Each Other tour will be the first dedicated tour for Jack’s Mannequin’s complete catalog in a decade. Last year, McMahon went on a similar retrospective adventure when he reunited with the original Something Corporate lineup for the first time in 20 years.

In an exclusive interview, McMahon, 42, talks about continuing his trek through his storied past, and whether he would want to relive some of the highlights from Jack’s Mannequin’s heyday, like Warped Tour and that One Tree Hill episode. “My vision has been to slowly walk through my musical history in hopes I’ll find out what’s next at the end of the road,” he says. “I feel like I’m ready for it in a way that I wasn’t when I was living it.” 

How did you decide you wanted to take Jack’s Mannequin back on tour? Was it just tied to the anniversary of the project and its debut, or did you make that decision after you had such a successful run reuniting with Something Corporate and revisiting that material last year?
It’s kind of been a part of the plan, honestly, since we decided on doing more Something Corporate shows. I didn’t really have the presence of mind at the time that I was in these projects to fully appreciate just how special they were, you know? With the Wilderness, when we had these successful moments, I was there for them. It made me crave a chance to walk back through those years in a healthier place mentally and physically. I feel like it’s a chance for me and the guys to get on the road and actually get to do a little bit of celebrating and revisit these songs and what they meant to all four of us.

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You’ve continued to play some Jack’s Mannequin’s songs throughout the years. What about the project are you most excited to revisit on this tour?
We did a few shows around Transit 10-year and we also revisited it during the drive-in shows, but obviously it was kind of a catalog set from there. So it’s going to be fun to really bring the Jack’s Mannequin catalog back to life and focus on that. It was such a fun band to be in, and it really was a very sort of bare bones rock & roll band, a four-piece. I’m looking forward to getting into the nitty-gritty of having to revive a really focused rock thing. I mean, I’ll get up from the piano and run around a bit, but when there’s just four of us, it’s like we’re all doing heavy lifting the whole show. It’s like a sweat fest. I’m excited to get into that energy.

This project was, for me, stepping into more of a studio-based, production-centric version of what I was doing with Something Corporate. And then bringing that to the stage with these guys who are all really just next-level musicians, it grew me a lot as a musician. There’s definitely something visceral about playing these songs and certainly as it relates to the story that was unfolding as this music was written. It was this huge turning point in my life.

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Even ahead of getting sick and writing Transit, it was this gigantic leap of faith to burn everything down and start from scratch. There was so much riding on it. There’s just an element of danger to a lot of these things, and then getting sick and having to survive that and then writing those stories and living through that with my bandmates… There’s sort of a tension and a release that’s built into every one of these songs. When we do it live, it’s really visceral. I’m looking forward to a little bit of art therapy over the next year.

I’m sure it will bring up a lot of emotions to go back to that time of your life, especially up onstage. 
I’ll be honest, I’m anxious about it. My therapist will be on call for this round. With Jack’s Mannequin it was so story-driven. Since it was mine exclusively from a writing standpoint, it became this vehicle to really latch my journey to my writing and be able to author those things through these three records. I never expected that Jack’s was going to be a three-record project, I think we just got so caught in the swirl of everything that was happening around the project.

Those three records, that period of life, everything is so attached and bound together. Stepping back into that will be a workout, emotionally and physically. I’m excited to be able to tell that story onstage every night. We’re going to learn all of these songs and try and keep the set really alive and unique from show to show so that people who are fans of the band get a taste of everything. As we get deeper into rehearsals, we’re going to try and get a lot of the B-sides learned as well. Obviously, we know it’s the 20-year anniversary of Transit, so there’ll be a lot of Transit in there, but we’re going to have a whole lot of time to really dig in.

Speaking of B-sides… Do you have any plans to dig into the Jack’s Mannequin archives and officially release songs like “Balloons?”
I can’t fucking find that song anywhere. Do you have it? Can you send it to me?

Yeah, I think it’s on YouTube somewhere.
It’s crazy. Those songs, “Balloons,” “Cell Phone,” “Out of It,” those three tunes very well could have been the beginning of The Glass Passenger. I was so insecure at the time and I felt like those were just really huge artistic leaps for me. I remember the label just not liking it. On Transit, I was like, “Fuck everybody, I’m going to do whatever I want.” All of a sudden I had a lot of people around me who I think were anxious about that turn. So I have a really deep affection for those tunes. Out of all the ones that I would be excited to figure out, it would probably be those three.

Why did you decide to name the tour after the Transit song “Made for Each Other”?
It was tough. There was a lot of back and forth. My team and I were just like, “what does it mean to be doing this?” The reality of Jack’s Mannequin, and truthfully of all my music, is it’s a love story. This record charted a break-up to a marriage to figuring our shit out as a couple. There’s that element that’s just so wound into all of these songs. It is about my bandmates too, these guys that stuck with me through thick and thin. We tested our relationships and survived and we’re here. It’s also about the fans. This project wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for that depth of bond from people who followed me from Something Corporate into this project and people who found this project. I was in the hospital for the first year that Everything in Transit was around, and the fact that it survived is such a testament to that fan base. It is a love story on so many levels and I wanted to bring that positivity and that energy onto the stage and into these rooms and surrounding everything that we do for the next year.

That song is a two-parter which connects with “You Can Breathe.” How do you plan to incorporate both into the setlist?
They don’t work independently of each other. That’s a 10-minute voyage and will remain so. With the Transit songs, I’ve done this top to bottom thing before where we play the record in order. I’m a little less inclined towards that. Who knows, maybe one night we’ll get weird and just do it. But what I learned during the Something Corporate tour is there is something sort of magical about finding ways to bring songs from one record into the setlist against a song from another and see the evolution and how these themes in the songwriting or the production evolved or the band did — but also how a lot of these themes are so closely tied together from one project to the next. It’ll be the challenge, but I think it will be what makes the shows really special.

Warped Tour played such a pivotal role for Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin, and it’s back this year for its 30th anniversary. Do you have plans to go back to the Warped stage?
Kevin Lyman is one of the very key players in launching my career, period. I have massive affection for him and for the Warped Tour and would totally entertain the idea of doing a show there if it was possible. But I’m being 100 percent honest when I tell you I have not heard anything.

One Tree Hill is so intrinsic to Everything in Transit, with the music video for “The Mixed Tape” and your appearance on the show. They’re reportedly working on a reboot. Would you join that if they called you up?
Fuck yeah. It’s like, Kevin Lyman launched Something Corporate, and One Tree Hill had a pretty heavy hand in helping Jack’s Mannequin get its footing. That was a really weird and critical moment in my life.  Just to get to shoot that episode, I had to get a brand new bus off the line, travel with two drivers — because I was still so sick when I went to film that. My doctor thought I was out of my mind. My fiancée, my now wife, was obsessed with One Tree Hill and so there was this crazy journey. It was just Kelly and me and the three guys in the band driving as fast as we could across the country just in case something went south with my health. That whole cast was so kind to me. We stayed in touch with some of them over the years when we lived in L.A. I would certainly make my way back to Tree Hill for a reunion if I was invited.

I’m excited for everything that you’re going to explore by looking back.
I was so resistant to doing these kinds of things. One of my strengths has been that I just keep moving forward. It’s almost a weakness, too. I’ve been afraid to look back because I’ve been trying so hard just to get to the next thing and prove that I have more in me. But as I turned 40, I was like, “You know what? These were moments that deserve to be revisited.”

It’s nice to be in a place where it’s OK to take a moment, take a year or two out of this wild ride just to say, “Look, you did something and it mattered to people, and it mattered to you and your friends and your bandmates, and let’s take a moment and nod at it and have some fun.”