Interview: Andrew McMahon

Perhaps it’s only fitting for someone who has Wilderness as part of his stage/band name that Andrew McMahon plans to get a little wild with his live shows this year.

Not to say there’s any real intention to live up to a name, but McMahon, in a recent video interview, said he’s ready to change things up with his show.

“I do think, the last handful of years, I don’t want to say the show has been regimented, but it’s been a little bit more of like a classic let’s build a set list, let’s really hit these marks. And I’ve enjoyed that a lot. I hadn’t really done that until the Wilderness,” he said. “I think it made it so the show, because there was structure, you were sort of hitting these marks and you’re getting better at it as the tour goes on, which is a beautiful thing. I’m going to try and maybe throw that out on this tour.”

McMahon’s thinking about the show he wants to present solidified during three recent album release shows for “Tilt At The Wind No More,” his current album. In addition to playing the entire new album, he pulled out songs from his extensive back catalog that hadn’t been performed in years, if at all.

“So all three nights, the set list was really, really different. I think it just gave me the sense like ‘Ah, maybe this is the thing that needs to happen for this next phase,” McMahon said. “It’s like leave the door open from night to night. At sound check, let’s learn a tune we haven’t played in awhile and really try to make the show a little more of a wild card, a little more spontaneous.”

The headlining dates that will make up the bulk of touring this year for McMahon and his band will give him time not only to feature material from “Tilt At The Wind No More,” but also a generous selection of songs from a career that now spans two decades and includes three distinct projects – Something Corporate, Jack’s Mannequin and Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness.

“I doubt I’ll do all 11 tunes (from “Tilt at the Wind No More”) every night. We’ll probably have somewhere around six or seven and maybe two or three of those will be rotating in and out from night to night,” McMahon said. “But I really believe in the album, and I feel like when we played these songs for people – I played the album from start to finish on all three nights (of album release shows) – you could really sense that people were getting it. There’s a lot to be said for bringing people into a room, and even if they haven’t heard these songs, like giving them the space to say ‘I know you’re going to want to hear these other tunes from my other projects or this project, and we’re going to do that, too, but I want you to just open your mind and your heart and let’s dance together and learn these new songs.’ I do want that to be a real part of the mission of the tour, for sure.”

McMahon came on the scene in 1998 as singer/keyboard player in Something Corporate, a band that released a pair of popular albums, “Leaving Through The Window” (2002) and “North” (2003) that leaned toward pop-punk before going on hiatus the next year.

At that point, McMahon wanted to explore a more classic pop direction with his songwriting and decided to make a solo album under the band name Jack’s Mannequin.

That album, “Everything in Transit,” was ready for release when, in May 2005, McMahon’s world was turned upside down when he was diagnosed with cancer of the white blood cells, or acute lymphoblastic leukemia as it is officially known.

On Aug. 23, 2005, the day “Everything in Transit” was released, he received a stem cell transplant from his sister, Katie.

The treatment was successful, and McMahon, having gone through that life-changing experience, returned to music, releasing two more Jack’s Mannequin albums, “The Glass Passenger” (2008) and “People and Things” (2011), before he transitioned to his current incarnation as Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness.

This current phase has now yielded four Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness albums. The first, a self-titled album, gave him his biggest hit to date when the song “Cecelia and the Satellite” went top 10 on four different alternative and rock singles charts. That album was followed by “Zombies on Broadway,” in 2017 and “Upside Down Flowers” in 2018.

McMahon began writing for the album that became “Tilt at the Wind No More” in 2019, but when the pandemic hit, he pivoted and decided to write his recently published memoir, “Three Pianos.”

“I knew that the pandemic presented an opportunity that I was not going to get at any other point, hopefully ever again,” he said. “So that really became my creative outlet and my mission for a good year and a half.”

During 2021, as signs started to appear that the pandemic might be easing, McMahon found himself returning to the piano to write songs – something he hadn’t felt inspired to do in the preceding year-plus as he wrote “Three Pianos.”

As new songs were getting written, McMahon got together with his co-producers, Tommy English and Jeremy Hatcher, knowing he wanted to work with a different instrumental/sonic palate than the mostly organic, largely piano-and-guitar centered, old-school pop-rock sound he crafted with producer Butch Walker on “Upside Down Flowers.”

What emerged was an album in “Tilt at the Wind No More” that sounds more in line with “Zombies on Broadway,” where McMahon liberally combined synthesizers, electronic tones and programmed rhythms with more traditional pop-rock songwriting and instrumental tones.

The mix of modern and organic works well on the new album, as McMahon has crafted some of his most immediately appealing songs to date. Perky songs like “Stars,” “Lying on the Hood of Your Car,” and “New Friends” judiciously mix treated rhythms, synthesizers and other synthetic tones with guitars, piano and other traditional instruments without getting cluttered, which allows McMahon’s graceful vocal melodies and the numerous instrumental hooks woven into these songs to shine. Other songs, like “Little Disaster,” “Built To Last” and “Smoke & Ribbons,” are ballads that feature a more sparse and moody sound. They contrast nicely with the album’s energetic songs.

The sonic treatments of the songs on “Tilt at the Wind No More” only emerged as McMahon, English and Hatcher worked on the tracks, and several songs (“Last Rites,” “Nobody Tells You When You’re Young” and “Smoke & Ribbons”) went through multiple very different incarnations before finding the forms they took on the album.

“There wasn’t really an intended sound,” McMahon said. “Honestly, our original plan when I first met with Tommy, he’s like let’s get in a room with a bunch of different pianos and a drum set. We had a completely different idea when we started...I think it was just what was in my brain for these songs was like creating a palate that felt really adventurous and sort of melded in with the organic sounds, which a lot of the programming that we did was with live drums. All of the synths we used, almost all of them, were still analog. So it was still very hands on. It wasn’t a very computer-y process for us. You just kind of chase the thread, and I think we were all on that wavelength at the time.”

McMahon will play The Pier in downtown St. Petersburg on Jan. 20.  Click here for ticket information.