Something Corporate Comes to Denver on Reunion Tour

If you see Andrew McMahon banging on his glitzed-out piano during Something Corporate’s current reunion run, don’t worry — he’s having a blast.

“It’s honestly been the most fun ever, which is why we’re doing it,” exudes the 42-year-old vocalist.

Something Corporate’s relatively short but successful run in the late 1990s and early 2000s was filled with memorable hits and albums, particularly with the single “If You C Jordan” off its 2002 sophomore album, Leaving Through the Window. But the band quietly quit releasing new music after 2003’s North and eventually faded from the forefront.

McMahon went on to form another hit alt-indie group, Jack’s Mannequin, and has had a prosperous solo career since Something Corporate's height, including fronting the ongoing project Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness. However, the time felt right to revisit the old emo outfit.

McMahon, Josh Partington (guitar), Kevin "Clutch" Page (bass), Brian Ireland (drums) and William Tell (guitar) had remained friends, so when McMahon planned his fortieth-birthday weekend in Vegas, he got the band back together for a surprise set. That eventually led to an appearance at last year’s When We Were Young festival, also in Sin City.

“I was like, ‘How cool is it that we did this?’ It was no longer for me about, ‘Well, that’s a thing I used to do, and this is what I do now,’” McMahon explains. “So when we got together that night with zero rehearsal, we had so much fun. That's why we put out the feeler to When We Were Young.”
Like finding and listening to a long-lost mixed CD, Something Corporate (or SoCo, as the cool kids called them) enjoyed the heavy nostalgia trip, so the five-piece, originally from Orange County, simply wants to keep it going. Who can’t relate?

“The process of just practicing again together and playing the songs again, then doing that festival and seeing the insane amount of goodwill there was toward the band, matched with the massive amount of fun we were having doing it, it was just like, ‘All right, cool, let’s book another one,’” McMahon says.

Something Corporate is bringing its Out of Office Tour to Mission Ballroom on Friday, September 27. Mae is also on the bill.

While there are no plans to work on a new SoCo record at the moment, McMahon and his bandmates have released some singles this year with “Death Grip” and “Happy,” both of which started as Wilderness material.

“I’m trying to be less precious these days,” McMahon shares. “I feel like you write these songs, you fall in love with them, then you wait for a year to collect them all and drop them out.”

He didn’t want to do that, which is why he called up his SoCo creative partner Partington to get the music out — with the band’s help, of course.

The single “Happy,” he says, “always felt like a Something Corporate song" — something that the group would write if the hiatus had never happened. But now, in the context of the times, Something Corporate is getting its flowers, and the bandmates are able to appreciate the praise more than ever.

“This is all about how weird this moment is where this loop of the music we wrote and toured on is becoming popular again. That’s really what that song is about,” McMahon adds. “You’re old enough to see the loop of the zeitgeist come back around and going, ‘Oh, God, we’re in another wave of what was cool when we were kids.’”

Now in hindsight, McMahon, who also beat leukemia after being diagnosed in 2005, gives Something Corporate credit for calling it quits back then. It was necessary, he says.

“As ambitious as I am and we were as a band, we started as friends. That was really the basis of our band, and what drew people to our band was our chemistry as five friends who loved spending time and making music together,” McMahon explains.

“At the point that we got off the ride, it was because that chemistry was coming up to a friction point,” he continues. “If we had kept going like people wanted to us to, I think we would have made some bad moves, because the nucleus of what really held the band together wasn’t quite what it had been when we started. … I’m really proud of us for choosing to be like, ‘Hey this was great, but it isn’t the thing right now.’”

Instead, Something Corporate is known as one of the biggest pop-punk emo bands of that time, having sold over a million records, and it continues to provide that much-sought-after nostalgia dump so many of us are into nowadays. And that goes both ways.

“We are on this nostalgia train with everybody,” McMahon says. “Our goal when we put this show together was to give people a chance to relive these memories and to be transported and let that moment of being transported become the new memory.

“It’s a really fun, as corny as it sounds, trip down memory lane,” he concludes. “There’s a lot of smiling. There are some tears from time to time. But it’s loud, and it’s fun.”

Something Corporate, with Mae, 7 p.m. Friday, September 27, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street. Tickets are $62-$213.