It’s simple for Andrew McMahon to really feel self-conscious when he listens again to “Everything In Transit,” his 2005 debut album as Jack’s Model. The Orange County-based singer-songwriter visibly cringes slightly, remembering how the piano-rock/emo-adjacent idea album chronicled a painful breakup with the girl who would ultimately turn out to be his spouse. (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, wanting again on the first album he wrote following the dissolution of his breakthrough band, the extra pop-punk-leaning One thing Company. “But I’m also like, ‘Oh my god, you were such a moron.’”
It’s taken a while and an excessive amount of introspection to look again on “Everything In Transit” and its tightly wound singles like “Holiday From Real” and “The Mixed Tape” with extra heat than anxiousness, a progress journey that culminated in McMahon proudly celebrating the album’s twentieth anniversary. On Oct. 11, he and the remainder of a reunited Jack’s Model (guitarist Bobby “Raw” Anderson, drummer Jay McMillan, bassist Mikey Wagner) will embark on the second leg of their MFEO (Made For Every Different) 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 reminiscences even additional is the twentieth anniversary of one other milestone, one McMahon’s 22-year-old self by no means anticipated to without end affiliate together with his music profession. In 2005, on the identical day he completed recording “Everything In Transit,” McMahon was admitted to the hospital after complaining of a protracted sore throat and fatigue. He was quickly recognized with acute lymphocytic leukemia and underwent chemotherapy and radiation. A number of months later, simply because the file was hitting cabinets, McMahon acquired a profitable stem cell transplant from his sister and was subsequently declared cancer-free. In 2006, McMahon based the Expensive Jack Basis, a nonprofit that works with adolescents and younger adults going through most cancers diagnoses. (One greenback from each MFEO ticket bought shall be donated to Expensive Jack.)
McMahon’s brush with most cancers may need been temporary, comparatively talking, however the expertise continued to hang-out him lengthy after he was given the all-clear. He threw himself into the spoils of band life, partying and ingesting to extra in an try and show that nothing had actually modified. “I was in denial of what it had done to me,” he says of his most cancers analysis. “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 Model formally broke up in 2012, and McMahon continued to put in writing and launch music as Andrew McMahon within the Wilderness. He would often get away Jack’s Model songs on tour, however he wouldn’t genuinely revisit the venture till “Everything In Transit” had its tenth anniversary in 2015. That yr, the ten Years in Transit tour made 10 stops with Jack’s Model enjoying its landmark debut in full for the primary time. This newest anniversary tour, nevertheless, feels to McMahon extra like an natural results of his being keen to embrace his complete catalog, from One thing Company up till right this moment. “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?’”
One other element to the Jack’s Model reunion is August’s shock launch “Everything In Transit: Strings Attached” EP, which strips down 5 tracks from the unique album with spare, acoustic preparations whereas including in orchestral strings courtesy of Allie Stamler. “It turned into this really vibey, experimental set of sessions,” McMahon says of constructing 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 materials this manner has additionally made McMahon begin to consider what future performances may 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 second, delving into the entire of his catalog on tour — together with One thing Company and Wilderness materials — has proved particularly therapeutic 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?’”
