When Andrew McMahon was a teen in California, he adored Green Day and Weezer. He showed his love of them by playing in a tribute to both acts called Tweezer.
“We played three shows,” McMahon says with a laugh. “We were pretty good, as far as cafeteria lunch performers go.”
Fast forward to 2004 and he met his heroes. His former band, Something Corporate, opened for Weezer on its Australian tour.
“That was life changing, getting back into that sphere,” he says.
Now, he’ll reunite with Weezer and Green Day when Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness joins the bands to play Innings Festival’s first day on Saturday, February 25.
“It really hit me,” he says about the schedule. “It makes me nostalgic.”
Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness is gearing up to release its fourth album, “Tilt at the Wind No More,” on March 31. He expects to preview a few songs from the record at Innings.
“My goal, at least by Innings, is to learn the song ‘Lying on the Hood of Your Car,’” he says.
“We have (the first single) ‘Stars’ in the mix. Until the record comes out, we’re going to lean on the tunes that are out.”
He recorded “Tilt at the Wind No More” with producer Tommy English, whose also turned the knobs for McMahon’s 2017 effort “Zombies on Broadway.” He says while he was recording, he pined for that moment of freedom and youth.
“I’m so proud of it,” he says about “Lying on the Hood of Your Car.”
“When you do this for as long as I have, you’re always on the hunt for something that feels like magic, something to hang your hat on. That song is really special.”
McMahon wrote the first verse in 2019 and loved it, but struggled with the storyline.
“It has this sort of nefarious, scary setup for a story, possibly,” he says. “When I came back to it last January/February, suddenly this is a song about me and my friends and my early romantic relationships, and how we were driving around after curfew. It’s all centered around the freedom of our cars. Through that lens, I connected the dots and finished the song.”
The songs were written in various sessions. “Stars” was started before the pandemic. He finished “New Friends,” but once the pandemic hit and the world locked down, he switched gears and penned the book “Three Pianos: A Memoir.”
By writing “Three Pianos,” he cleared his head of trauma — his father’s struggle with addiction and his public battle with acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) in 2005 at the age of 23.
“I was clearing the deck of a lot of trauma and history that I hadn’t quite confronted,” he says. “It set me up for the writing sessions that followed this album and started the process of me getting back in the studio.
“I’ll be turning 40 when the record come out. I will have been on the road for more than half of my life. I wanted the songs to reflect that, to reflect the places I had been through, an aspiration to be free of past trauma and to be looking forward to the future and what could be.”
Over the last two decades, McMahon has experienced musical rebirth many times and has consistently arrived on the other side stronger.
The East Coast-born, SoCal-based artist first co-founded the pop-punk outfit Something Corporate in 1998, serving as the group’s singer, pianist and songwriter and leading the band to major chart success in the early 2000s.
Soon after, McMahon resurfaced with the more personal solo project Jack’s Mannequin, finding success through three studio albums. In 2014, McMahon released his debut album under his own name and new moniker, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, featuring the breakout top 5 alternative radio singles “Cecilia and the Satellite” and “Fire Escape.”
Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness — McMahon (lead vocals, piano), Bobby Anderson (guitar), Jay McMillan (drums), Mikey Wagner (bass) and Zac Clark (keys) — has since released the hook-packed albums “Zombies on Broadway” (2017) and “Upside Down Flowers” (2018), amassing over 275 million total streams to date, performing at such marquee festivals as Lollapalooza.
McMahon has also sold nearly 2.5 million albums across all of his musical projects, received an Emmy nomination for his work on the NBC show “Smash.”
Additionally, in 2006, McMahon founded the Dear Jack Foundation after surviving ALL. The nonprofit charity provides programming that directly benefits adolescent and young adults diagnosed with cancer to improve quality of life and create positive health outcomes from treatment to survivorship for patients and their families. For more information or to donate, visit dearjackfoundation.org.
McMahon says there’s an existential bent to the music, a sense of trying to pass on some of his wisdom.
“The crazy, early stages of life can be kind of tricky and test your mettle,” he adds.
He admits he’s had a difficult few years. He learned to breathe and take the good when he could get it right.
“I understood that if I’m standing on two feet and I have a roof over my head and I’m feeding my family, I’m doing better than a lot of people,” he says.
“I appreciate that on the hard days. I had to find a way to celebrate the fact that I’m alive. I tried to write some of that into this music.”
Innings Festival
WHEN/WHO:
Saturday, February 25: Weezer, The Black Crowes, The Offspring, The Pretty Reckless, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, The Glorious Sons, Heartless Bastard and Annie DiRusso
Sunday, February 26: Eddie Vedder, Marcus Mumford, The Revivalists, Mount Joy, The Head and the Heart, Umphrey’s McGee, Magic City Hippies, Paris Jackson and Hazel English
WHERE: Tempe Beach Park & Arts Park, 80 W. Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe
COST: Tickets start at $112
INFO: inningsfestival.com
