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Alt Press interview: http://www.altpress.com/features/entry/andrew_mcmahon_in_the_wilderness_interview_2014

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First thing’s first, there’s a diverse range of influence I can hear in the album, from Tom Petty to Fun. What were your main influences going in?

Certainly! There was kind of a combination of things from listening to what’s on the radio these days. As far as the classic influences, I mean there’s a Petty influence, a lot of those records Jeff Lynne produced from the late 80s. Definitely Petty, Bruce Hornsby and Don Henley. They were all going with this idea of using drum programming but doing it in a way that still honoured a classic sound, and I felt like they were great rock musicians who did a great job of incorporating modern technology of the time into records that still making themselves feel like rock acts. In the last year or so, late 2013 was certainly a factor in the making this record, everything from the Vampire Weekend record to Lorde and Broken Bells. Those were a lot of the sounds I was taking in.

Were there any songs where you kind of just stopped and thought “Wow, this is way out of my comfort zone”?

My comfort zone was pretty broad on this record. A lot of the process of getting ready for this record, and the projects that I had worked on throughout the year or so leading up to writing this record, were all about pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I did a lot of writing sessions before the album started with different producers and different artists. I was in a spot where I felt particularly open. When it comes to the writing of the song, it’s a lot more focused on writing classic songs, the production I think is where we started stretching our comfort a little bit. Even songs where we went too far, we started reeling in when we got into the mixing process. I was in a comfort zone when we started writing the record.

You chose to work with a plethora of producers for this record but mainly Mike Viola, what led to this decision?

You know, Mike is a good friend of my manager and I sort of began the process of writing on my own. I wrote a handful of songs which ended up on the record and we started fleshing out seams. I got to a point where I was looking for collaboration, there are a number of ways you can get to the same ending when making records. I had gone from being in this cabin up in the hills of Topanga Canyon for a couple of months thinking “Okay, I think I know what the themes of this record are gonna be, now I need to focus on the actual sound and refine these songs”.

So, I met with Mike one day and I brought ‘Rainy Girl’ in and played it for him, and we tweaked it and we just had such a natural chemistry. We worked in his garage, he has two little girls and my wife was about six months away from having our little girl, and it was this kind of moment where there was just something about this guy in this moment of my life where I just feel like we’re connecting. I kind of call him the spirit guide for the record, he kind of walked me down the road of the album and into fatherhood and all these things. He was a really fantastic collaborator to have on board for the album for sure.

And then from that you self-produced ‘Rainy Girl’ as well. What made you want to strip everything back for that song?

It’s a funny thing, we had actually finished the record and I was on the road this summer with a couple of buddies supporting their tour. We were getting all the mixes back for this record and I was listening to it and it felt great, but there was just this feeling I had where I felt like we were just missing a moment. ‘Rainy Girl’ had always been in the mix of songs that we had talked about producing for the record and as it goes, you only have so much time. Literally, I was working on the album all the way up until the day that I left for tour and so we just hadn’t gotten around to it. As I was listening to the album I just thought that the one thing we were really missing from this record is just a really quiet broken down moment where the piano and the voice can speak. It just felt like there was something missing.

So I booked a day in the studio in Atlanta while we were on tour literally the night before I had a day off. We only had a couple of weeks left before the album needed to be turned in. We found this great studio in Atlanta and I went in and cut the piano and vocal and called a buddy of mine called Patrick Warren who has worked on a couple of my records and is a really talented arranger and I had him sort of add that sparse arrangement to it.

I mean, yeah, it’s ‘self-produced’, but really if you want to call me sitting at the piano singing a song and someone hitting record ‘produced’, then I guess that’s my hard work. But I really think the record needed something like that.

You also kept this record quite concise, how tough was the sequencing process, and what made you eventually leave off the B-sides coming out on the Japanese version of the record?

The truth is, for me, I’ve always liked 10 song records. It’s a funny thing because over the years, no matter how many times I try to get to a 10 song configuration, it alludes me. There’s always a song that I can’t seem to get myself to cut.

I think in general with this record, I tried to be really focused from the writing process to the finishing. I think I was just hellbent on this idea that there were songs that I loved that were going to get left behind, but in the digital age, it’s not like any of those B-sides, once they’re out, aren’t available to the entire world as it is.

I wanted to focus on making a tight configuration that people can listen to on short drives and hear it start to finish. Short albums have always been my favourite records like the Blue Album by Weezer is 10 songs and so is Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. There’s a long history of great 10 song records and I was hoping to add to that.

There seems to be an overall concept with the artwork, did you play a part in the ideas behind that?

It’s interesting, the biggest role I had in the artwork (besides choosing the photography once it had been shot) was actually picking the photographer. The photographer who shot the cover is this guy named Jimmy Marble. I’ve been in love with his work for a really long time, probably for the last couple of years. I just followed his Instagram, someone really turned me onto his photography and he’s one of the few people who I actually follow on Instagram. Just about everything that he puts up just moves me and over the years, I’ve continued to dig into the things he puts up on his website, he does a lot of little short films. It was just something about his eye that I was really connecting to throughout the whole process of making the album. We were actually just referencing his images for the cover of the album. At some point, one of my bandmates came on the bus and had a little bit to drink, and I was talking about his photography and my bandmate just says “Why don’t you just call him up and see if he’ll do the record?” and so we did. We called him and he said yes.

I gave him carte blanche, which has not always been my thing, but I trusted his eye so much and we had about half the record mixed at that point so we sent him about everything we had. He sent me about four different set ups, different styles that he would be interested in shooting in and just asked me to pick one. We picked the one that had the more natural element. It was his concept to have the two girls on the front and to shoot these women out at the beach in Malibu and I saw that image and immediately thought “that’s it”, and we built the rest of the packing around the cover so that it all kind of made sense.

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Andrew McMahon chats new record, his writing process for the new album and tour essentials!

This next interview is with an inspiration for many of the other bands I interview for Music Remedy. His name? Andrew McMahon. Known for being the front man for Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin yet at the moment and for the future, he is playing as Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness. I was able to grab a few minutes with him directly after his sound check for his show he played on Thursday in Copley Square. You can next find him on the Wilderness Politics tour this fall with New Politics!

While some bands like to stray from questions about songwriting obviously more so if they aren’t involved in the process, I knew it should be the central focus of an interview with Andrew McMahon. Despite only being thirty two, Andrew has always been the main songwriter in his projects. If not the main which is what he has been for the majority of his music, he has been a major component of it. In our new interview, we spoke about his upcoming fall tour plans, his essentials for touring as well as a full look at his writing process in the past as well as his present. If you’ve been following Andrew’s career, you’d know how much of a role music plays in Andrew’s life. From the highs to the lows, which include him writing his first solo record i.e the first Jack’s Mannequin record to then right after he finished, be diagnosed with leukemia which he beat in his very early twenties. He also wrote his current single ‘Cecilia and the Satellite’ as kind of a road map to the point he got to meet his daughter. His music is ingrained in him. Find his new song ‘Cecilia and the Satellite” on the radio now and look for possible new music in the new year!

You have the Wilderness Politics tour coming up later this fall with New Politics, the record just came out a few months ago but maybe a soft one to start. The three things you must have with you while on tour?

Three things I must have with me when I travel? I mean I hate to say my iPhone, it’s kind of a no brainer thing. It plugs me back into the world. It makes it possible for me to see my daughter when I’m not with her. A combination of either a black notebook or I’ve been carrying these hotel pads. Like the ones that are on the side of the hotel bed and that’s where I’ve been kind of like doing all my girly notes and writing to get ready to write more music. Then I have a backpack that literally is attached to me almost everywhere I am and rarely is gone from my person.

Then obviously you have a lot of records under your belt but this is your first full length record for the project that you’re doing now. How do you think it’s been going over? I know you have this song that you wrote for your wife and your daughter, ‘Cecilia and the Sattelite’ that’s hitting radio right now. How do you think it’s all been going over so far for you?

I mean you know it’s hard to be objective about that. I mean from the objective standpoint, especially since it came out last year to now, it seems like it’s going really well. This is definitely the best any of my records have done on radio which is after fifteen years of releasing music. To see that happening I mean is huge so on some fronts, it’s doing better than ever. Then yeah with the shows especially, since we started this festival season with Coachella in April to now, it just seems like people are finally connecting all the dots. It’s been a mission to get people to even realize hey this is Andrew from Jack’s, Something Corporate. There is new music and I’m glad it happened the way it did because I think a lot of people found Cecilia and they were like wait a minute, I know that voice from somewhere. Now you see it sort of circling back at these shows. You have people who just discovered the music blended in with people who have been diehard fans from the early days. I think it’s brought a lot of people back around to the Jack’s and Something Corporate catalogues which is kind of why I put my name on the project. It was so that I could get on stage and sort of play my life’s music. Not just one project as opposed to another which is kind of what happened when I was with Jack’s. We just did Jack’s Mannequin songs. We didn’t do Something Corporate songs. Now with my name, we can do everything which has been a lot of fun.

Then is that something you try to do in your sets? You do a blend of all your projects, do you focus mostly on the new?

I mean I focus on the new stuff in the sense that you have a brand new record. I think a lot of writers that have pivoted in different projects over the years, while the nostalgia is built into my music and built into my soul, I never wanted to become a heritage act. In my thirties. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, you’re still so young.

Yeah and I think there’s this thing that happens for bands. They carve out a sound and a scene then they never grow past that. That’s great if you’ve already sold a bazillion records and you have radio and you have all those things in place and you’re a big artist. But when you’re like a niche artist as I’ve been for so long, I have kind of a more cult fan base, you have to sort of keep pushing your sound. Keep pushing your sort of comfort zone so that it doesn’t become that. With that in mind though, these are still the songs that I’ve written. This is my life in these songs so the idea of not digging into those songs and sharing them with people is crazy. So usually about half the show is the new record and the other half is bits plucked out from the Something Corporate catalogue and the Jack’s catalogue. It’s all blended together.

Speaking of all that, I know you’ve always been a main songwriter in all of your projects. For this album in particular, was it something where you wrote the songs particularly for this album or were some of the songs previously written that maybe you didn’t fit the other projects? How did you go about the writing for this record in particular?

It was all written, like I started the project in I guess it was probably September of 2013, and I finished the project in May of 2014 I want to say. Every song other than one was written in that time period. The song “All Our Lives” was written the year before but it was after I had already said goodbye to Jack’s Mannequin. So all the material is fresh. I wanted it to be. I wanted the album to reflect where I was at the moment that it came out. There’s a danger if you write for three years for a record. Then all of the sudden, the narrative becomes a little disjointed you know. I really wanted it to be very current.

Then I wanted to ask you. When it comes to your writing, do you think even though you’ve been doing it for so long, you’re only in your early thirties.

32.

So even though you’ve been writing for so long, do you think you still change it up or do you think it’s become like a steady rhythm?

No I actually turned my entire process upside down. Jack’s kind of wound down around the beginning of 2012. We did our last tour just before the summer of 2012. I took that year more or less as a stop gap between those two things. Leading up to that, even on the last Jack’s Mannequin record, I had done some co-writing for that record and I also had sort of started writing for other artists and other projects. I found myself really inspired by the process of collaboration in a writing room. It was something that I had been terrified of almost my whole career. It was sort of a last frontier for me. A last frontier but a new frontier for me. To say like what happens if I get into the writing room and we’ve done work that I’m really impressed with? Try to make a song in that space and what I found was this additional element of visceral. I don’t know the right way to explain it other than this kind of kinetic energy that happened when we were in the room. When you’re spit balling production ideas and chords and writing on the spot in this frenzy. I kind of dug into that right away for other artists and writing for tv, for Smash, and so when I started this record, I wanted to experiment with going to these productions and showing up with maybe a lyric or an idea or a thought or nothing at all and see what happens when I get in a room with one or two people. Just try and create a song from scratch and that’s how I approached most of this record and that was a huge evolution for me. A huge change. I think there are all different roads to the same conclusion, to the same end. I have to feel super connected to the song. I write almost every word to the songs that I can. Singing someone else’s words doesn’t feel as easy but the collaborative element of the process is much heavier on this record that any other record I’ve ever done.

Then considering, I know you’re coming back to play House of Blues during your co-headliner with New Politics and you have already headlined House of Blues with this project. You’ve really been touring a lot with it. You’ve done support touring as the act. Do you think a new record is even on the horizon or maybe are you going to see how these songs go? I know you’re probably always writing in some sense.

Yeah I’m writing a ton. I already have a handful of songs that are in process. Some that I’m really excited about. I feel like the next record you’re going to make is always going to be your favorite one. I didn’t stop writing after this record was released which is something that I’ve done historically. I usually kind of just purge myself. You get into the promotion aspects and everything. I was dead set on not losing the sharpness of the writing tool so I just kept going with it. Yeah there’s a bunch of songs that are in various stages of writing. Certainly, it will be strategically released. The song, ‘Cecilia and the Satellite’, after forty six weeks at alternative just now is finding this whole new life at other formats of radio. We’ve sold the most singles last week out of any other week. So I’m going to follow it to the end of the earth. It’s important to me to do that. Obviously it’s not my biggest hit yet but to have it be even bigger, I’m going to chase that as far as I can. We’re preparing to release the second single in the fall. Yeah we do all of that but certainly if I get more music under my belt between then and the beginning of next year, I’m going to get it out as quickly as I can.

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After that, he'll start writing again, though he revealed that his camp already feels "like we have the first single off the next record, and we’re excited about it."

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Now, it's time to look forward. Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness released their first self-titled album in October 2014, and after the Jack's reunion, the California native will start concentrating on a follow-up before the band hits the road for a summer tour with Weezer and Panic! at the Disco.

"I won't know if [the album] is done until I'm done. I could be halfway through or I could be 10 percent through," he said. "There are four or five songs I'm really connected to that aren't finished, but I feel like the heart and soul of them are there, so February, March and April will be, in theory, a telling period of creative time."