Andrew McMahon Reveals Something Corporate’s First Tour in Over 20 Years
"There's a little more age and blood and sweat and love that has seeped into the arrangements," frontman tells Rolling Stone
We have some “Good News”: Something Corporate have announced their first tour in over 20 years.
The announcement arrives after the SoCal pop-punk band reunited for a handful of shows last year, hitting the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas and a pair of New Year’s gigs in Anaheim, California. The 2024 tour, which kicks off in New York City on June 21, features the original lineup: frontman Andrew McMahon, lead guitarist Josh Partington, bassist Kevin Page, drummer Brian Ireland, and guitarist William Tell. Check the dates out below; tickets go on sale March 1.
The trek marks Something Corporate’s first tour following their hiatus in 2005. McMahon went on to form Jack’s Mannequin and his solo outfit, the Wilderness, but die-hard fans have been patiently waiting for Something Corporate to reunite for years. You can watch a promo video, where the group pays homage to Office Space, below.
In an exclusive interview, McMahon told us about the tour, the lore of the fan favorite “Konstantine,” and pop-punk nostalgia. “The stuff that we have in the set feels very relevant,” he says. “There’s a little more age and blood and sweat and love that has seeped into the arrangements that I think make it feel a little more polished than it did back when we were doing it the first time.”
Take me back to the beginning. How did the idea to reunite come about?
Honestly, to use an overused term, it was very organic. I’d say the genesis was two Septembers ago now. It was my 40th birthday, and I’d been on tour with Chris [Carrabba] from Dashboard Confessional. Weirdly, it was one of the first throwback kind of tours I had done, even though I was doing it as the Wilderness. I’d resisted the temptation, and then it felt like, for whatever reason — approaching 40 and all these things — I was like, “I’m going to go hang with one of my old homies from the day.”
So we did the whole country together, but he couldn’t play Anaheim because he had another commitment. So I put up a show, and I called the guys because we all live pretty close. Brian lives in Austin, but he’s been one of my closest friends for a long time. So he sat in. But I hadn’t really played with the other guys in a long time. I was like, “Would you guys be down to do a surprise set at my 40th birthday party? As a surprise — we don’t pitch it, don’t make people buy tickets for it so we don’t have to stress if we fuck up.”
And it was kind of magical. We did a semi reunion in 2010 with Bobby [Anderson], who was the filling guitar player when Will left the band in 2003. It’s not to say I wasn’t fully invested, but for me at that moment, it was just checking a box because I knew fans wanted to see that. Whereas, when we got together at my 40th, it weirdly felt like it did when we were 16. And so I floated out to my agents, “If there’s a festival or if there’s something out there that seems worthy of a reunion, let me know,” and then We Were Young came up. And it just felt celebratory. It wasn’t work. It was just too fun to not try and do a few more times.
When We Were Young is too perfect an opportunity, especially with the resurgence of pop punk.
Yeah, it’s amazing. What’s interesting for me is, especially with Jack’s Mannequin, I was like, “This is my thing.” I really tried to put a partition up between my Something Corporate era and the Jack’s Mannequin era. And then with the Wilderness, all of a sudden, we had success at radio, and I started feeling more comfortable just harmonizing all of these disparate moments in my life and just calling it, “These are the songs I wrote.”
What’s funny is when Chris and I started talking about that tour, which was honestly in 2020, there wasn’t really this fervor for nostalgia. That wave hadn’t even… Not only had it not broken, it wasn’t even cresting. And then we booked it, and When We Were Young popped up. We thought we were so clever, and meanwhile, behind the scenes, this thing was already coming together.
The thing that I had been running from for so long — wanting to just stay relevant and be modern and do whatever was next — for the first time, I was like, “No, this was really special.” And then Amy [Fleisher Madden] put out the Negatives book, and I had written my memoir. All of a sudden I was feeling so much pride for where I had come from. The shows are great parties, people are so joyful. Seeing them en masse drinking the Kool-Aid, being like, “We want these memories back!”
You’ve played some of these songs in Wilderness sets, but with SoCo you guys are bringing back rarities like “She Paints Me Blue” and “As You Sleep.” How does that feel to revisit?
Really great. I’ll be honest: The bands I built in the aftermath of Something Corporate, I picked guys that are ringers. And I mistakenly — honestly, I’m not even proud to say this — but I thought, “This [reunion] will be fun, but I won’t feel as musically fulfilled by this.” We were a high school band. These dudes don’t even play music professionally anymore. And I just grossly underestimated, one, just how great these guys are as musicians, and two, how powerful it is to be back in spaces, playing songs with the people you learn to play with.
Everybody leaned in so hard that playing these songs had new life because we’ve lived so much since we actually made them in the first place. And I’ve heard this review from multiple people who have come to these shows, like, “You guys just look so happy.” And I really, legitimately, think that’s true. We’ve now gotten to play, I think, five shows, and we just all have these dumb grins on our faces. And I think it’s largely why we’re doing it in a few more places, because it’s like, “Well, if it feels good, let’s do it for a minute, and we will call it our summer vacation.”
I have one Something Corporate song I’m going to ask you about. Can you guess what that song is?
Well, I could probably, but I’ll let you say it instead.
I want to know the lore of “Konstantine.” What are your feelings about it now, more than 20 years later? It’s really taken on a life of its own in the last 20-plus years.
OK. I’m going to eat a bite of food. I need protein to answer this question. You never know how long the answer will be for how long the song is.
That’s fair.
Look, I think the reason it has been this weird unicorn of a song throughout my whole career is [because] it’s a very earnest, very long, very wordy expression of what it’s like to be young and in love and also to have your heart broken. The reason it was so potent is because written about honestly a few people, and it was the the last gasp of three different relationships that had tracked through at least large portions of my time in high school. Some of them overlapped, and there were breakups and makeups. A lot of it, I’m not very proud of, to be honest. But I think in that moment it was like I just couldn’t stop writing, which is a beautiful thing.
The first version of that song is a live recording. The song wasn’t meant to be 10 minutes long. It was a typical pop-structured song, and I got to the middle and instead of stopping, I just sang every verse I had written and thrown away. And that recording is what got popular underground in Orange County. One of the girls who was a part of this song was in the audience, and I was trying to win her back. It became this very earnest teenage moment where I was in this band that was actually selling clubs out now, and we were hometown heroes. It all just got wrapped up in that song — the conversations about trying to become a rock star, all of that frenetic love and heartbreak and dreaming. And now I have to be heckled for it every night. It’s the story of my last 20-plus years.
Because you’ve gone through years where you don’t play it.
Yeah, in general, I don’t play it. I have reserved it as an annual benefit for my charity, Dear Jack. That being said, when I went out with Dashboard, I was like, “The people who are going to come to this show are going to expect this.” If you’re coming to an Andrew McMahon show, my hope is that you’re there because you’ve followed all of the music and understand why I’m not going to supplant three songs in the set list to play one. But with Something Corporate, of course, I’m going to play that song every time we’re going to get on a stage.
In my surlier late Something Corporate and then post-Something Corporate days, I would actually get angry at people. Now I laugh about it. If people heckle me enough, I’ll do a little joke version where I’ll play a chorus of it, and I’ll say, “Take out your phones, tell all your friends that I just did a 45-minute version of ‘Konstantine.'” I do love the song. It’s just long.
What about songs that haven’t aged as well, like “Drunk Girl”?
So, I didn’t play “Drunk Girl” for the first three shows. If you listen to the lyrics of that song, it’s pretty clear it’s me that’s getting taken advantage of in this situation. I feel fine about it, but I was the naive kid in that. But I was a little hesitant to play it. And then honestly, I think context is important. For me, I’m a very sensitive person. I don’t want anybody to feel unsafe or unseen at any show I play. But I felt like it was a bit of an overcorrection, and I heard so many fans were just like, “Dude, how are you not playing ‘Drunk Girl?’ ” So we did it at the New Year shows, and so far, people seem to understand and get it.
Look, there are songs on the records that we haven’t revisited yet that probably weren’t even our favorites on the records that they were released on, and so we probably rarely played them to begin with. We may because now we’ve got a lot of the catalog learned. I could see us diving into some of the other material. We haven’t played “Good News.” There are songs off the EP [2021’s Audioboxer] like “Little” that we haven’t played. So I’ll be curious about those.
When you think about writing all these songs in this era, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Do you identify with that Andrew at all?
I do. There was a time maybe that I wanted not to, and that’s why it was easier to just pack it all away and move on. But I was still that person. I like to think I’ve grown a lot. I’m better at relationships; I’m better at friendships. I think the beauty of having stayed in this business for as long as I have, to have to write songs for a living, you have to be vulnerable. There’s an earnestness and a sense of dreaming and hope that the next thing is going to do well. So there is a part of that younger version of myself that has to be accessed on a daily basis just to wake up and say, “I’m going to do the music business today.” It’s such a shit show, and it always has been. Instead of letting the cynicism that I think can take hold when you do this for as long as I have, I really leaned into the optimism.