2005: Jack’s Mannequin, Everything in Transit

By J. David

Hallelujah to the Dark: On Jack’s Mannequin’s Everything in Transit

Maybe Everything in Transit Finds Some Depot at its Rest

When lead singer Andrew McMahon announced Something Corporate’s hiatus in 2004 it wasn’t because he intended the band’s permanent end, but rather because of his ennui with the road life. After a long year of touring in support of the band’s latest album he was tired and mostly alone. His co-writer and lead guitarist, Josh Partington, was hard at work on a side-project that would become the band Firescape, and the rest of Something Corporate—Bobby Anderson, Kevin Page, and Brian Ireland—had returned home to their respective lives. McMahon had no significant other, was estranged from his past friends after years of pouring himself into the band, and suddenly felt out of place in Los Angeles. Finding himself with an abundance of free time and no consistent way of spending it he began to make more music, coming to build on a song he had written and recorded in December of 2003: “Locked Doors.” 

The single didn’t fit inside the niche Something Corporate had carved out for themselves; it was less pop-punk and more softcore-storytelling indie rock. So McMahon had shelved it, intending to return later. And though he never intended to release “Locked Doors,” and in fact wouldn’t do so until a tenth anniversary edition of Everything in Transit, it set the stage for his next project: Jack’s Mannequin.

Where Something Corporate was boisterous and catchy and leaning for a mainstream pop-punk sound that was claiming the day, McMahon’s writing and musical composition for Jack’s Mannequin went in a different direction. It was piano-heavy and narrative, more project-based and interested in the personal details of his life. These early songs he was writing would become the foundation of Everything in Transit. They dealt with break-ups, moving across the country to pursue his dream, the subsequent feeling of uprootedness and abandonment, and navigating feelings of purposelessness. Many of these early songs wouldn’t make the band’s first album Everything in Transit, but they would be saved for later projects and allowed for McMahon to cut his teeth in making deeply personal music outside of the pop-punk vein.

The Accidental Album 

The project’s name initially carried the moniker “The Mannequins,” but growing tired of bands with “the” names, McMahon decided on the insertion of “Jack’s,” after a song he had recently laid down for the project: “Dear Jack.” Andrew noted later that though the band name had little significance to him at the time, upon being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia it became ironic. The Jack he wrote  “Dear Jack” for and named the band after suffered from childhood leukemia. In this and other ways, much of Jack’s Mannequin’s discography would act as prophecy for McMahon’s own life, an act of calling into the world the path he intended for himself. Andrew was discovering his life alongside his listeners.

Irony carries through much of Jack’s Mannequin’s discography, probably since it often feels haphazard and inconsistent, like practicing at something. Which makes sense—it was an unintentional consequence of life that it even began. But McMahon managed to cobble something beautiful together on Everything in Transit. His first project as Jack’s Mannequin ended up so very good and enduring. And this wasn’t because it excelled at any one thing, but rather because it DIDN’T excel at so many things—many aspects of Everything in Transit are a haphazard assembly, just passable enough to make it work as McMahon schooled himself in solo composition.

In Everything in Transit the overarching breakup/move-on narrative fades in and out, lapsing from project album to personal narrative. But these deviations work, simply because the microscopic moments that are blown up into verses have incredible story-telling:

She thinks I'm much too thin
She asks me if I'm sick
What's a girl to do with friends like this

She let's me drive her car
So I can score an eighth
From the lesbians
Out west in Venice

McMahon’s voice is admittedly very shrill and breakable, but it’s practiced enough to do the trick, especially on “Dark Blue.” Sometimes the lyrics border on cliche for the purposes of making the listener included, but this doesn’t often work. Other times, however, the writing reaches for poetic movement reminiscent of Mary Ruefle: “kill the messenger / I swear it’s not me / it’s just someone I used to know.” McMahon is so much better on piano than the rest of the band is at their instruments, but such that it stands out in a disharmonious way that’s appealing; as if the sounds within each song are competing, and each time the piano manages to win.

Everything in Transit does so many things imperfectly, but it does so earnestly, and makes it feel like growing up. And I think at the heart of this album was the concept of growing up. I think at its heart, Everything in Transit is an album about purpose in life, about what you prioritize. It’s imperfect and messy in the same ways your late teens and early twenties can be, but also it was a sequence of stills from so many moments that matched my life, and I treasured that. 

McMahon’s accidental-project-turned-album was intensely important in how it made me feel seen. It gave me permission to be messy and make mistakes while managing to give myself grace enough to continue. The album told me that it was okay, sometimes, to prioritize nothing in life, to look at life and simply exist and observe. Take for example flowers, who have no societally constructed purpose for their lives. They simply grow beautifully and smell nice and exist. I discovered that I can do that, too. Grow and be beautiful and smell nice and exist. 

I found the value in aimlessness for the first time listening to how Andrew made this girl his entire life and then left her to follow his dream of music and when the music ran out his life lost its purpose. But that’s the thing, he discovered the freedom in purposelessness. That’s the freedom which makes his music most earnest:

But if you left it up to me
Everyday would be a holiday...
From real.

This album sticks with me because of how it tries to do so much, how it explores the nuances of sound afforded to it. How it tries to have complex and interesting melodies, profound lyrics, intricate storytelling, stylistic vocal ingenuities, repeatable and catchy songs. And it does each of those well enough to make you interested, like laying down the first few breadcrumbs, only enough to get you started down the right path and letting you find the rest yourself. It isn’t a prescriptive album, laden with constructive advice or moralizations. Instead, its breadcrumbs lead you alongside McMahon as he figures life out in the songs, both musically and lyrically. It’s an album that feels reachable, like something you could participate in. You’ll never be wildly impressed with the sound or the writing but it will forever feel familiar and welcoming, another thing to treasure.

At its very core Everything in Transit is an experiment, one that asks the question of whether or not we are alone in our existential grief and if anything can fill the hole that idea will create inside of us. It doesn’t try to answer the question, instead choosing to find comfort in the queries that make up our lives. It falls in love with bewilderment and surrenders to life’s potential for awe. This surrender is most apparent in the moments Everything in Transit lets go of things—the chase of popularity and fame, a relationship, old lives, societally constructed purpose:

I’ve got my things, I’m good to go

You met me at the terminal,

Just one more plane ride and it’s done

We stood like statues at the gate

Vacation’s come and gone too late

There’s so much sun where I’m from

I had to give it away, had to give you away

My Forever Music

N.—the second of my partners in high-school—put “Dark Blue” on the first mixtape she gave me. After every date we’d dance beside the car with its doors open blasting “Dark Blue,” and I have since kissed almost every person I’ve ever loved to that song, and almost always while dancing; in the street, in the park, on rooftops, in bars, during concerts.

The song itself feels to me like everyone I love has gathered in a room and somehow I am still alone. This is because it’s a song about loneliness and the ways we try to fill it, about how lonely we are despite people, how lonely we are despite being loved. But, too, it is also about being hopelessly in love—enough to forget your existential dread for a moment and for a fleeting second belong entirely to that moment.

I will remember forever N. and I in the driveway of her grandparent’s house after watching the Oscars, “Dark Blue” announcing itself from my speakers—the soundtrack to a long kiss—hearing the ache of each other’s living and knowing I would take every heartbreak a thousand times over if it meant I’d know love. There are few things like it—the holy insurgency of a moment you would trade a thousand years of sorrow to preserve—and so many of the perfect seconds in my life have been soundtracked by this, the sixth song on Everything in Transit.

“Dark Blue” comes in a moment on the album where Andrew’s world has been slipping away, after a series of melodramatic retellings of listlessness and absence. It is the perfect elevation of sonic frequency, almost as if McMahon is reminding us that despite the apocalypse we stand at the precipice of, there is beauty and value in love, that in fact it might be the only thing that matters.

If you haven’t heard the song yet I’ll summarize: Andrew and this girl he’s head-over-heels for that he’s probably just met are watching a globally eviscerating climate event and there is a room full of people and there is almost certainly dancing; and so there is, most likely, this room full of people dancing and they know either everyone or nobody but none of it matters. It’s the kind of song Bertold Brecht was talking about when he wrote, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”

The accompaniment the band provides musically is perfectly layered, with the piano laying down the mainline rhythm and electric guitars and drums rambling in and out of focus with each chorus and crescendo. There is, about two-thirds of the way through the song, a guitar solo that allows McMahon and the piano to rest before the return of a final chorus. Very few moments in my music-listening life can compare to hearing that solo for the first time with the windows down and my car speakers about to blow on a backroad highway forty miles from anywhere.

I can’t promise anyone a song or an album or an artist will save them, we have always done that ourselves. But there are some projects that contain within their repository of memory enough stills and distillations of people and moments we treasure, that if even for a second, they can convince you of our lives’ merits, of the merits in love. Everything in Transit is one of those albums for me, and “Dark Blue” is one of those songs. I return to it differently each time, a little older, and perhaps more-or-less nostalgic at times, but always with a softer heart.

Often have I spent the midnight hour circling my block on foot with Everything in Transit on repeat, reminded of long walks around the Furman lake with Anna, music in our pockets; or Dan and I perpetually speeding down highways as these songs play; or realizing for the first time that despite the burden of her death, Emily gave me a small and wholesome grace to carry forever; or the uncountable kisses that trained me in love. It is an album I return to when I wish to be reminded of the fact that the people I have been made the person I am, one of the few pieces of art I have learned to count on in the dark.

J. David (they/them) is a geneticist and writer from Cleveland, Ohio. They work at Case Western Reserve University in a lab whose research focuses on diabetes and rare pediatric endocrine disorders. In their spare time they serve as Chief Poetry Critic for the Cleveland Review of Books and also as Editor-in-Chief of Flypaper. J.'s debut chapbook Hibernation Highway was released from Madhouse Press in 2020 and individual pieces by them can be found in the Harvard Review, Colorado Review, Muzzle, Waxwing, Passages North, and elsewhere.