Sitting Indian-style on a leather couch in the back of his tour bus, Jack's Mannequin frontman Andrew McMahon gave no indication that he is a leukemia survivor.
McMahon was diagnosed on June 1, 2005, shortly before the release of the band's first album, "Everything in Transit." Four years later, he is touring with the band promoting their latest album, "The Glass Passenger," which he began writing while he was in the hospital undergoing treatment.
"It's a pain in the ass," McMahon said, referring to the process of creating a record while suffering through cancer, but it was something he felt he had to do.
"With 'Passenger' there really wasn't a lot of options," he said. "I knew what I had to do and it was a lot of hard work, but it was worth it and it was the way it had to be done."
But even so, he didn't want to make it entirely about his sickness and exploit the struggle, he said.
"It was tricky, trying to find the balance of dealing with the aspect of having been sick," McMahon said. "I'm a pretty autobiographical writer so it was a bit of a push and pull trying to figure out how much of that I wanted to disclose."
McMahon admitted that he ended up writing a lot more about his struggle with cancer than he originally intended. It seemed almost out of necessity, that he needed to address his sickness in order to write himself out of a hole. The best songs ended up being the ones he wrote about cancer, he said.
Songs like "Caves and The Resolution" on "The Glass Passenger" are obvious tributes to that period of McMahon's life, and they express a sense of determination that is easily seen in his demeanor on and off stage.
"I tried my hardest to kind of make it about the aftermath and maybe more of the re-acclimation to the world post-being sick as opposed to actually being sick," McMahon said.
When people listen to the album they should feel a sense of "hope in hopeless places" that can be applied to any situation or any struggle that you find yourself in, he said.
"For me the theme wasn't just about being sick, it was, in a lot of ways, just about the record itself," McMahon said. "The idea of just feeling like I had a huge mountain to climb and just climbing it."
Now, four years after he was first diagnosed with leukemia, Jack's Mannequin is headlining a college tour in preparation for its tour with The Fray this summer.
McMahon said that although it seems like it would be difficult to perform the songs written about his struggles, it has never been a problem for him.
"I think certain artists maybe have to re-access the emotion of a song to play it, and there are certainly some songs that I will do that with," he said. "But for me it's so much more about performance and trying to execute that it doesn't really devaluate the meaning of the track to me."
In fact, he said, some songs that they play have come to mean something completely different for him than when he originally wrote them. He called it a rebirth of his sentiment toward the meanings of the songs.
Along with touring, McMahon is also planning several benefit concerts for his charity, the Dear Jack Foundation. The foundation, which McMahon began in July 2006, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding cancer research.
"The way that we are set up is like a conduit, we facilitate other's charities through out charity," McMahon said. "The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has proven to be one of our biggest partners."
The band did what was called "Light the Night" walks with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and raised more than $100,000, McMahon said.
Other beneficiaries of the Dear Jack Foundation include the Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation, the Regents of the University of California and the ULCA stem cell transplant program.
He said he started the charity because it seemed like many people didn't know where or how to donate.
"At the end of the year if someone says, 'I want to donate to a charity,' and they know that the dude in a band they listen to has one, then we would be there for them to do so," McMahon said.
As for what's next with Jack's Mannequin?
McMahon and the guys are working on writing a new record that they hope to record once they are done with touring in the next few months. McMahon has no idea what the theme of the record is going to shape into, but the band has been taking a very "bare-bones" approach in the studio lately with just piano and acoustic instruments, he said.
"Part of me is really tempted to just walk out on a huge limb … and do something that I've always want to do, which is really flesh out the songs and make sure they are great songs and then sit and orchestrate a record rather than just go in and rock one out," he said.
Jack's Mannequin and McMahon are looking forward to long successful careers as musicians in the pop scene.
"If performing like this is all there was until the end, I'd be psyched," McMahon said.
Molly Gray can be reached at gray.557@osu.edu.
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