We have “Good News”: Something Corporate have announced their first tour in over 20 years.
The announcement comes after the SoCal pop-punk group reunited for a handful of shows last year, at the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas and a pair of New Year's Eve concerts in Anaheim, California. The 2024 tour, which kicks off in New York 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 below. ticket sales begin March 1.
The trek marks Something Corporate's first tour since going on hiatus in 2005. McMahon went on to form Jack's Mannequin and his solo outfit, Wilderness, but die-hard fans have been patiently waiting for a Something Corporate reunion for years. You can watch a promotional video where the team pays tribute Office spacebelow.
In an exclusive interview, McMahon spoke to us about the tour, the cult of fan favorite “Konstantine” and pop-punk nostalgia. “The stuff we have on set is very relatable,” he says. “There's a little more age, blood, sweat and love that's gone into the settings that I think makes it feel a little more polished than when we did it the first time.”
Take me back to the beginning. How did the idea for the reunion come about?
Honestly, to use an overused term, it was very organic. I would say the genesis was two Septembers ago now. It was my 40th birthday and I was on tour with Chris [Carrabba] by Dashboard Confessional. Surprisingly, it was one of the first tours I had done, even though I did it as Wilderness. I had resisted the temptation, and then I felt that, for whatever reason – approaching 40 and all – I was like, “I'm going to hang out with one of my old homes from back in the day.”
So we did the whole country together, but he couldn't play Anaheim because he had another commitment. So I put on a show and invited the guys because we all live very close. Brian lives in Austin, but he's been one of my closest friends for a long time. So sit inside. But I hadn't really played with the other kids in a long time. I said, “Would you be down to do a surprise set at my 40th birthday party? Shockingly — we don't, don't make people buy tickets to it so we don't have to worry about screwing it up.”
And it was kind of magical. We did a semi reunion in 2010 with Bobby [Anderson], who was the fill-in guitarist when Will left the band in 2003. It's not that I wasn't fully invested, but for me at the time, I was just checking a box because I knew the fans wanted to see that. Whereas, when we got together in my 40s, I felt as weird as when we were 16. And so I talked to my agents, “If there's a festival or if there's anything out there that seems worthy of a reunion, let me know,” and then We Were Young came along. And it just felt festive. It wasn't work. It was too much fun not to try to do it a few more times.
When We Were Young is a pretty perfect opportunity, especially with the resurgence of pop punk.
Yes, it's amazing. What's interesting to me is, especially with Jack's mannequin, I said, “This is my thing.” I really tried to draw a line between the Something Corporate era and the Jack's Mannequin era. And then with Wilderness, all of a sudden, we had radio success, and I started to feel more comfortable just harmonizing all these disparate moments in my life and calling it, “These are the songs I wrote.”
What's funny is that when Chris and I started talking about that tour, which was honestly in 2020, there wasn't really that nostalgia fervor. This wave hadn't even… Not only hadn't it broken, it hadn't even crested. And then we shut it down and When We Were Young came on. We thought we were so clever, and meanwhile, behind the scenes, this thing was already coming together.
What I had been running from for so long – just wanting to stay relevant and trendy and do whatever was next – for the first time I said, 'No, this was really special.' And then Amy [Fleisher Madden] delete it Negatively book and had written my memoirs. I suddenly felt so proud of where I had come. Shows are great parties, people are so happy. Seeing them drinking the Kool-Aid en masse, saying, “We want those memories back!”
You've played some of these songs in Wilderness sets, but with SoCo you're bringing back rare hits like “She Paints Me Blue” and “As You Sleep.” How does it feel to revisit it?
Really great. I'll be honest: the bands I made in the wake of Something Corporate, I picked guys who are ringers. And accidentally—honestly, I'm not even proud to say this—but I thought, “This [reunion] it'll be fun, but I won't feel as musically fulfilled by it.” We were a high school band. These dudes don't even play music professionally anymore. And I just grossly underestimated, one, how great these guys are as musicians, and two, how powerful it is to go back to venues, to play songs with the people you learn to play with.
Everyone leaned so hard that playing these songs had new life because we've been through so much since we actually did them. And I've heard this review from a lot of people who have come to these shows, like, “You're too happy.” And I really, legitimately, believe that to be true. Now we're up to, I think, five shows, and we all have these goofy grins on our faces. And I think that's a lot of the reason we do it in a few more places, because it's like, “Well, if it feels good, let's do it for a minute, and we'll call it summer vacation.”
I have a Something Corporate song to ask you about. Can you guess what this song is?
Well, I probably could, but I'll let you say that.
I want to know the tradition of “Constantinos”. What are your feelings about it now, more than 20 years later? It really has taken on a life of its own over the past 20 plus years.
Okay. I'm going to have a bite to eat. I need protein to answer this question. You never know how long the answer to how long the song is going to be.
That's fair.
Look, I think the reason I've been this weird unicorn of a song my whole career is, is [because] it's a very serious, very long, very wordy expression of what it's like to be young and in love, and to have your heart broken. The reason it was so powerful is because it was honestly written for a few people, and it was the final gasp of three different relationships that had spanned at least large parts of my time in high school. Some of them overlapped and there were splits and make-ups. A lot of it, I'm not too proud of, to be honest. But I think at that moment it was like I couldn't stop writing, which is beautiful.
The first version of this song is a live recording. The song wasn't meant to be 10 minutes long. It was a typical song with a pop structure, and I got to the middle and instead of stopping, I just sang every verse I had written and flew away. And it is this recording that became popular underground in Orange County. One of the girls that was part of that song was in the audience and I was trying to win her back. It became this really serious teenage moment where I was in this band that was actually selling out clubs now, and we were hometown heroes. It all came together in this song – the talk of trying to be a rock star, all that crazy love and heartbreak and dreams. And now they have to pester me about it every night. It is the story of the last 20-plus years.
Because you haven't played it in years.
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 came out with Dashboard, I said, “People coming to this show are going to expect this.” If you're coming to an Andrew McMahon show, I hope you're there because you've watched all the music and you understand why I'm not going to replace three songs on the list to play one. But with Something Corporate, of course, I'll be playing that song every time we go on stage.
Back in the days when I was building more slowly on Something Corporate and then after Something Corporate, I would get really angry with people. Now I laugh about it. If people annoy me enough, I'll do a little version for fun, where I'll play a chorus, and I'll say, “Get out your phones, tell all your friends I just did a 45-minute version of 'Constantina.' I really like the song. It's just too much.
What about songs that haven't gotten old, like “Drunk Girl”?
So she didn't play “Drunk Girl” for the first three shows. If you listen to the lyrics of this song, it's pretty clear that I'm the one being taken advantage of in this situation. I feel good about it, but I was the naive kid in it. But I was a bit hesitant to play it. And then honestly, I think context is important. For me, I'm a very sensitive person, I don't want anyone to feel unsafe or invisible in any show I play. But I felt like it was a bit of an over-correction and I heard so many fans say, “Man, how come you don't play 'Drunk Girl?'” So we did it at the New Year's shows and so far people seem to get it 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 they came out on, so we probably rarely played them in the first place. Maybe because we have now learned a lot from the catalog. I could see us diving into some other material. We haven't played “Good News”. There are songs from the EP [2021’s Audioboxer] like “Little” which 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 this Andrew at all?
I accept. There was a time when I might have wished I hadn't, so it was easier to just pack it all up and move on. But I was still that person. I like to think I've grown up a lot. I'm better at relationships, I'm better at friendships. I think the beauty of being in this business as long as I have, having to write songs for a living, you have to be vulnerable. There is a seriousness and a sense of dreaminess and hope that the next thing will go well. So there's a part of that younger version of me that you have to access on a daily basis, just to wake up and say, “I'm going to do music today.” It's such a crappy show, and always has been. Instead of letting go of the cynicism that I think can set in when you've been doing this for as long as I have, I really leaned into optimism.
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