Jack's Mannequin - Everything in Transit (2005)Today was unseasonably warm in New York City, hitting a high of 66 degrees in the middle of November. The streets of Brooklyn were exploding with people excited to see the sun. I kept hearing the line from a Jack's Mannequin b-side in my head that goes, ". . . And it's hard to ignore that it feels like summer all the time." I decided to take my lunch outside to the patio and revisit my ultimate Summer album, Everything in Transit.
I hadn't really been a fan of much of Andrew's stuff in Something Corporate, only visiting a few songs here or there. I first heard about his "side project" from my friend Allie, who went to see him play a solo show at the old Neckbeard's in Tempe. The name would slip in and out of my consciousness here and there after the album was released but I didn't think to much about it. This was at the same time that I shared an office with the music director at The Blaze and sometimes got to take the CDs that wouldn't be played on our ultra-indie radio station. He dropped the album on my desk and asked if I wanted it, so I went ahead and took it because I was curious. I ended up becoming obsessed with it, even spending a 6 hour drive to Los Angeles with Allie listening to the record over and over, taking pictures in a spot that looked like the album cover and writing "Fuck yeah, we can live like this!" in the sand in Venice Beach. You can't get more infinite than this record.
The name Everything in Transit is ideal for this record because it deals with such transient themes. It is very centered on the West coast and to this day, even while listening on my porch in Brooklyn, I felt like I was in Venice. It isn't just references to Hollywood and the beach, but the chaos that is being young and never really having a home. I don't think any of us are ever sure where our past ends and our home begins and for myself and most of my friends in their early to mid twenties, we're in the inbetween of those things. I remember listening to the b-side "The Lights and Buzz" while packing to move back to Arizona after interning in NYC. The song starts with "I'm coming home from my hardest year and I'm making plans not to make plans while I'm here. This life has been no holiday, a complicated situation, I'm fine with all my memories, still I could use vacation." That has become such a poignant line for me in many of my travels as each year I reach different goals that were even harder to reach than the one before. I couldn't have planned any of this if I tried.
It is as perfect a pop record as anything I had heard, interspersed with sound bites of sirens, conversations and with almost every song ending with the faint creaking of the seat of the piano. I know I've said more than once about albums on this list that they are albums you have to listen to in the exact order they came in or else it just doesn't sound right. However, this is the ULTIMATE album for that, because it literally tells a story. We all know the back story of Andrew McMahon, having just finished this record and being diagnosed with leukemia the same day. I feel though that the story of this record has less to do with HIM for me and more to do with this character he was talking about before all of that went down. However with that being known, it is an emotionally exhausting record in imagining this charcter, plus the circumstances of Andrew's illness, plus sometimes taking these lyrics and applying them to your own life. There are very few records I feel have that power and even today, I found myself tearing up while feeling homesick yet enjoying the beautiful weather. Much like the idea of home, these characters exist in this vaccum of spontinaety before the real world begins.
Everything from the happy-go-lucky "La La Lie" to the 8 minute opus of "MFEO : You Can Breathe Now" is necessary in telling this story and keeping the dynamic of chaos tugging you in either direction while you listen. While there were some good songs on the follow up record The Glass Passenger, McMahon set the bar with this record as it teeters between his pop punk carefee days and his post cancer settled down and married ways.
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