‘The Rising Tide Lifts All Boats’ (Exclusive)
More than 20 years after the release of their last album, North, So-Cal alt-rockers Something Corporate are back. The band is currently on tour across the U.S. and has two brand new songs — including the just released “Happy” — as part of a collaborative project with Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, the solo act formed by Something Corporate frontman Andrew McMahon.
PopCulture.com had a chance to sit down with McMahon via Zoom, and he shared some insight into what it was like to make new music with his Something Corporate bandmates again, describing the collaborative approach by borrowing a quote popularized by President John F. Kennedy: “The rising tide lifts all boats.”
“‘Death Grip‘ was really crafted and built very much” as an Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness song, the frontman told us, explaining, “It used to be, I’d write a song alone at the piano and then I’d go into the studio with my bandmates and we would just play until it felt good, or we would do that with a producer and we would do it in pre-production, and then we would go into the studio and we’d do it, and then we’d refine it.”
“My process has evolved over the years to where I still do a lot of writing at the piano alone, but I really try and use the studio and the speakers as a writing tool,” he continued. “The record that you hear…a lot of that is happening in the speakers and there are these very intentional arrangement decisions made on what’s coming back at us and how it makes you feel when you hear in the speakers.”
McMahon again clarified that “Death Grip” — the first Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness and Something Corporate single — “was going to be a Wilderness song,” until he realized it was more than that. “When I came back and I had this finished production, very much a la my process now, I called Josh [Partington, Something Corporate founding guitarist] and I basically said, ‘I have this song and it’s really about being in this moment where I’m trying to loosen my grip, and a part of loosening my grip right now is celebrating the fact that I was in these bands and I had these moments and that it’s not a thing I’m running from anymore.”
He then made the offer to Partington: “What would you think about getting the guys back together and we could basically take this production as a jumping-off point and then everybody plays on it and we do it as a collab?” The response: “He was really into it.”
Throughout that process, however, McMahon had another song, “Happy,” that had been “sitting in my little Dropbox of tunes that I wrote in 2021,” among others that he chose not to put on 2023’s Tilt at the Wind No More, the fourth Andrew McMahon in the Wildernewss album. “It always just felt like there was just this kernel of Something Corporate in this song,” he said. “If Something Corporate were making music 20 years after we broke up, this would be the entry point.”
“It was always right there in the back of my mind, and that’s why I never even produced a version of it for Tilt at The Wind No More,” McMahon continued. “It sat as a one-day production demo that I did with my friends that we loved, and I was always like, ‘This is a banger. I feel like it’s a hit.’ I don’t know why I wouldn’t put it out, but I just didn’t.”
During his conversations with Partington about “Death Grip,” McMahon realized he should also mention the other song that he been like a Tell-Tale Heart in his mind. “I was like, ‘There’s also this other thing. This isn’t a produce demo, this is just a demo. Check it out.’ I sent it to the band and I almost feel like in the funny way where they were like, ‘Dude, Death Grip’s cool, but we’ve got to cut ‘Happy.'”
“We had the bones of the song, but it was really more about what happens when we get the band into the studio and we start from scratch,” he continued. “With ‘Death Grip,’ we started with the production and everybody played into the existing production. With ‘Happy,’ it was like, ‘Let’s use what I had from the writing session, but let’s just grind this out together.’ That bridge in Happy, that was all a live moment where Brian and Clutch [Kevin “Clutch” Page, Something Corporate bassist] figured out like, ‘Oh, this is a sick groove,’ and I was like, ‘That’s the bridge. Let’s do that.'”
“It’s all an evolution and everything I’ve been through and everything that we’ve been through collectively and separately feeds into the way that we produce these songs, “McMahon went on to offer. “But I think ‘Happy,’ in a lot of ways, is a real earnest representation of if we just kept going with this, this is maybe where we would be heading. I think it speaks to where we’re all at because I had no intention of putting music out.”
Speaking “frankly,” McMahon added, “If I’m being honest, when people would ask me, my answer was always very steadfastly… ‘Nobody actually gives a f— about new music from this band.'” He does not mean this “in a bad way,” more that, if the Something Corporate “had kept making music” past North, he believes there would be “a different conversation” surrounding new music from the band.
However, life went the way it did, the members of Something Corporate went their separate ways, and, now, have reunited in way that has been profoundly impactful for McMahon. “When I found myself… broken open, singing the lyrics to ‘Death Grip,’ I think a lot of what made it possible for me to find those words and find that song was that I was finally opening myself up to this magic all around me,” he said.
“This experience that I was having with my friends,” McMahon continued, “the fact that I was still writing songs that were cracking my chest open, and then all of a sudden I was like, “Maybe it doesn’t matter if anybody likes this shit. Maybe what matters is that we are on this ride, me and my friends, and we’re in a very pure way just choosing to enjoy each other’s company and choosing to indulge for a moment in the thing that got us together in the first place, which was our love of music and bringing songs to life together.”
Something Corporate fans can click here to stream “Happy” and “Death Grip,” as well as find links to concert date/tickets for the “Out of Office” tour, and enter the “Just Wanna Be Happy” contest for a chance to win a free cabin on Andrew Mcmahon’s Holiday from Real Cruise. Keep it locked to Pop Culture for more of out conversation with Andrew McMahon!
