On the count of three, everyone say, “Welcome back, Something Corporate.”
One.
Two.
Three!
Andrew McMahon is the voice of the alternative rock generation. Everybody knows the hit single “Dark Blue” from Jack’s Mannequin, and many piano rockers know of his incredible solo material as Andrew McMahon In The Wilderness, but OG fans remember his very first band: Something Corporate. The band shook up the scene in 2002 and paved the way for the emo bands after them with songs that still sound quintessentially early-emo. Something Corporate’s discography gives us the same wonderful nostalgia that those first few Dashboard Confessional albums do, and they are much more than a product of their time, because the music is timeless.
I vividly remember the first time I had heard Something Corporate. I was at Emo Nite in Boston many years ago, I was partying it up until 3:00 a.m., and suddenly the DJ played “Konstantine.” The room erupted. The song was melancholy and emotional – a stark contrast to the upbeat New Found Glory song that played before it. It was such a unique feeling seeing an entire room of people so happy to hear such a sad song. It reminded me of what I really believe this genre and scene is all about.
Fast forward to 2023: Something Corporate was announced to play When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas. It was a one-off show, but the excitement for the band’s performance hung heavy in the air leading up to their set. One can assume that the joy and anticipation people had for that performance is what prompted the band to announce a full summer tour this year, and they’re playing the Stone Pony Summerstage tonight. The band also has two new singles out now – “Death Grip” and “Happy” – that are as timeless as the two-decade-old hits we fell in love with.
Andrew! It’s a Something Corporate reunion! This is the first time you announced a reunion and played together since 2010’s Bamboozle Festival.
It’s funny; when we did the 2010 reunion, it wasn’t the full original lineup, but it was most of us, and I think that was almost a perfunctory we had to do this 10 year reunion thing. Obviously as a band that never officially broke up and just disappeared, we thought, “Let’s put something together for that.” This was much more of an organic outcropping of us seeing each other as friends.
As I was approaching my 40th birthday, I had thrown this birthday party at the end of a tour in Orange County at a venue. I had been talking to the guys a bunch around then and they were all coming to my 40th birthday in Las Vegas the next day. I said, “What do you say we just surprise the audience and play six tunes?” We did a full surprise set at my birthday party! It was such a joy. For a band that was together in high school then blew up, we were on this rocketship that was really hard to appreciate when we were in the middle of it. On stage at my birthday party, we were really present and just loving it. It left the door open to the We Were Young [Festival] offer that came in. “Yeah! Let’s do that! Maybe we’ll just do When We Were Young!” Then that was so fun that we were like, “Let’s just follow this through.”
Obviously we have to work with a lot of schedules. Everybody has got lives, careers, and families. We built it out so we could pop out for a handful of weekends over the summer and do this thing we’re having so much fun being back at!
That is amazing! When you guys started the band, you really were so fresh out of high school and you quickly got a major label deal for Leaving Through The Window. What do you think about that now, looking back 20-something years later?
Yeah, it was crazy! The truth is that we worked so hard. My real job in high school was promoting Something Corporate. By the time I was in my senior year in high school, a couple of the guys had gone off to college, and right before they left for school, we thought the band was over. We thought this was done. We couldn’t get a venue to let us have a show anymore, so we threw our own show at a local playhouse – a community place, a playhouse. Over 400 people showed up! In that moment I just said to myself, “Well, look, I think there’s something here. If we can promote a show on a week’s notice and have that many people come…” That began this process of flying Josh in from Arizona once a month, and we were doing these big shows. They just kept getting bigger and bigger to the point where I had graduated and all of the sudden there was this interest from labels.
It might sound weird or presumptuous, but it’s the only thing I ever wanted to do since I was nine and started writing songs. I had been sending demo tapes to record companies since I was a kid. It had always been in my mind; “This was going to happen.” I was going to do whatever it took to get there, so when it did happen, certainly we were pinching ourselves, but as you can imagine, we were in a van playing shitholes and dives all over the country and building this thing fan-by-fan and show-by-show. Gosh, fast forward a couple of years and we were doing Warped Tour in 2002 and we had played a couple of tours that were getting even bigger. It was, in that moment, [like a] slingshot engaged. Leaving Through The Window was out, people were finding out about the band, and we got to travel the world. Yeah, it was surreal. My friends were going off to colleges and I was getting on tour buses.
You talk about slowly building that fanbase one-by-one. With Jack’s Mannequin and The Wilderness, you had success pretty quickly. Both of those projects have Gold records to their name. With Something Corporate, there was so much more of a build that required hands-on work. When you announced this reunion, did you expect as many people to love this as there are? Do you think your early-2000s self working hard at building this would believe it?
I suffer from the same imposter syndrome we all do as creatives and that so many cite in their own lives. I’m never one to assume success. I’m one to celebrate it when it comes. You can ask my agents, managers, and even my band. I was ridiculously conservative about this. Playing We Were Young was, “Well, that’s great! It’s a soft ticket, a festival show.” Then there was this idea of, “Why don’t we play a small venue the night before the festival?” The only room that was available was the House of Blues. It’s an 1,800 capacity venue. I remember thinking, “Dude, we’re not going to sell out House of Blues in Las Vegas of all places!” It went up and sold out immediately. Even my head was spinning, like, “Really?”
Even as we were booking these dates and seeing the sizes of the venues that were chosen, I was cautiously optimistic. Like I said, I don’t take anything for granted. This business – that’s one thing I can say for sure – is it’s so unpredictable. There are tours/singles/records that I think are going to be huge and they don’t go all the way. Then there are things that come out of nowhere on the same front that blow up. You can’t predict the zeitgeist and it’s certainly nice to be in this moment. People are excited and it really has made it a whole lot of fun to come back to so much love and genuine enthusiasm.
I feel the same way! For a while Something Corporate was the OG fan card, but now you’re bigger than ever. You’re bigger than you were in 2002, bigger than you were in 2005 as Jack Mannequin, too.
If you look at the numbers, it certainly seems that way! There are venues we’re playing on this run that we wouldn’t have dreamed of selling out back in the day.
I think time does a funny thing; these songs have been around for a long time and I think there are people who realize the songs mean more to them than they even knew back in the day. We had so many fans that were concentrated in the Northeast. A lot of people move around the country. We couldn’t get [a small venue] in Nashville for Something Corporate, to now sell out a show at The Ryman the day it went up? I was scared to book that show. I’ve just been continuously surprised and really grateful. We would be having fun anyway, but certainly when you walk into a sold out room and you see its people that sold it out – in some cases, within minutes since the tickets went on sale – you feel that energy in the crowd. You really do feel it, and it makes for a really joyful set.
You mentioned the music, and “Death Grip” and “Happy” are the two new songs. I imagine that’s got to be so strange for you as an artist to think about, like what does Something Corporate sound like in 2024, having been 20 years with no new music?
I really tried not to approach it from that angle: ‘What would Something Corporate sound like in 2024?’ The shows were born out of this very natural process. I had written “Death Grip” on a side trip to Nashville to hang out with some friends and fellow writers and producers just to keep myself sharp. (I like to go on these writing trips when I don’t have responsibility and I’m not at home; I can just put myself into my creative process.) On the last day of that trip we wrote and pretty much recorded a version of “Death Grip.” It did the thing in me that I always look for in a song which is, I want to listen to it on repeat when it’s done. It knocks at some universal truth that’s been welling up in something I’ve been trying to say. It posed a problem, though, because in another life I’d sandbag it and try to write nine more and call it an album. In this sort of climate and having released a couple of records that, admittedly, the process of releasing them was not so joyful. I was like, “I just love this song and I just want to put it out.” Then, “Well, shit I’m playing two to three months of Something Corporate dates, so it’s going to be weird to put out a Wilderness song in the middle of that!” So I called Josh [Partington, guitars] and I said, “I have this song I really love, do you think you and the guys might be down to get in the studio with me, recut it, and see what happens? We’ll see if we like it and if we want to put it out.” All the guys were like, “Yes let’s do it!”
In the process of that, I had been holding onto this song “Happy” that I had written for the last Wilderness record, but always felt that it was a Something Corporate song. That is where the collaborative nature [starts]. “Death Grip” is pretty much a Wilderness song, but it’s got the Something Corporate guys playing on it. “Happy” is really a Something Corporate sounding song born out of the Wilderness process, so we flipped the names on the releases. I really just looked at it as more of a moment in time, of me and my friends are having so much fun and thinking, “What if we can just throw some new music into that?”
Now that you’ve recorded and released two songs, is the door open for an album in the future? Could there be another Something Corporate record?
The pencil sketch in my mind is that over the next year or two, dare I say, I have this one foot in memory lane and this other foot in walking myself into the future. I could see a record of other potential collaborations – maybe with the Jack’s Mannequin guys again and just trying to piece together these three vehicles that have been so important to my life and career. Finding a way to build an album that’s a home for all of them, maybe? Maybe that opens the door for another Something Corporate song, other collaborations with other artists, and people that have been important to the journey thus far.
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