via BroBible
Welcome to our new interview show, where we get culture makers out of the studio and into their actual passions. First up: a millennial piano legend and a wall of vintage agave.
Welcome to the first episode of BroBible Side Quests.
The idea hit me a couple months after my Warren Haynes interview.
I love a good conversation, but the podcast-studio format is wearing thin, two people in headphones dutifully talking about the work. The best stuff always leaks out sideways, when somebody’s doing a thing they love and half-forgets there’s a camera. So that’s the show. We take a culture maker out into one of their actual passions, we get into it, and we talk. Everybody’s got a third thing, the hobby or obsession that isn’t the job but tells you who they really are. Side Quests goes looking for it.
Episode one is now live on the BroBible YouTube with Andrew McMahon.
If the name doesn’t land, the songs will. He’s the iconic Orange County pop punker behind Something Corporate, Jack’s Mannequin, and Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, which is to say he soundtracked roughly every millennial feeling worth having between 2002 and now.
This summer he’s bringing all three acts to the same stage for his Three Pianos run: Philadelphia on August 8, Chicago on August 14, and Long Beach on August 22, the last one practically his backyard here in Southern California. Learn more about the tour on his website.
For Andrew, the side quest picked itself. The man is a serious mezcal head. “There’s always a bottle of mezcal on my rider,” he told me. He got hooked back in 2018, when a bandmate brought a bottle to a tour stop and they never looked back. So we met him at Old Lightning, the hidden speakeasy tucked into Scopa Italian Roots in the Marina Del Rey neighborhood of Los Angeles, where the rare tequila and mezcal collection runs from 25 bucks to 25 grand.
Our guide was Marco, the restaurant group’s director of hospitality, who has a story for every bottle on the shelf and poured us four of the best.
Here’s what we drank:
- Sauza 1970s — A floral and smooth tequila that I think tastes like how a vintage wood-paneled basement feels. A vintage tequila, Mixto Blanco, 70% agave, 1970s. “Winner of the Golden Cup.”
- Pal’Alma Oaxaca — Heavy smoke up front, with a sweet finish no one is expecting. San Martinero agave, tahona-crushed, 58%. The bottle we drank here at Old Lighting was number 15 of just 48.
- Vago · Don Aquilino — Almost no smoke. Perfectly balanced. Mexicano and Tobala, clay-pot aged, made by the late mezcalero legend Don Aquilino.
- Del Maguey Chichicapa — The one Andrew calls “perfection,” and he hates vanilla mezcals. This was a one-time run released in 2017, aged in Weller and Pappy Van Winkle barrels. Del Maguey by Ron Cooper, an artist and mezcalero legend.
Here’s what we discussed:
Andrew’s three-project concert marathon this summer.
McMahon has fronted three bands across his career, and the Three Pianos show stacks all of them into one three-hour set: Something Corporate, Jack’s Mannequin, and the Wilderness, back to back. It started as a 40th birthday lark, when he surprised his hometown crowd by reuniting the full Something Corporate lineup for the encore, then snowballed into last summer’s Red Rocks show, the biggest headlining gig of his life. “I found myself wanting to look back a little bit,” he said, from a guy who swears he’s not the nostalgia type.
Beating leukemia at 22.
He was 22 and about to launch Jack’s Mannequin when the leukemia diagnosis hit. He beat it, married his girlfriend right after (they’ll hit 20 years this December), and turned the strange, searching years that followed into The Glass Passenger. “I was starting a new life,” he said. A dollar from every Three Pianos ticket now goes to his Dear Jack Foundation, which helps young adults facing the same fight.
Fifteen years to a hit.
Believe it or not, Something Corporate songs like “Konstantine,” “If You C Jordan,” and “Punk Rock Princess” never became proper radio hits back in the pop-punk MySpace era of the early Aughts. Same with Jack’s Mannequin staples like “Dark Blue” and “The Mixed Tape.”
It took until 2014 for one to finally break, and “Cecilia and the Satellite” was worth the wait: a gold single he wrote for his daughter before she was even born. Her name went into the song after she arrived. Then he toured it with his wife and baby on the bus for three years, which he still calls cosmic.
Andrew’s crusade against ticket resellers.
Here’s where the nice-guy piano man evaporates. Get him on StubHub, and he’s genuinely furious: a $35 ticket flipped for $500, bots hoovering up inventory, real fans priced out of something he thinks should be closer to sacred. All he wants is the option to opt out, and on this tour he took it. Three Pianos tickets are locked to face value and can’t be resold above it. “People should be in the streets about this,” he said. He’s not wrong.
Then we closed the way we plan to close every episode, with a lightning round after Andrew mixed us up a strong mezcal old fashion.
Most regrettable fashion choice of the early Aughts?
The studded belt, hands down, back when it was briefly acceptable for a boy to bedazzle. No defense offered.
A song you never get sick of playing?
“Paper Rain,” a deep cut off the third Wilderness record with a Springsteen-style train beat. He wrote it during a genuinely broke stretch, spinning a story about gambling his last chips at a craps table into something like hope.
In-N-Out order?
Grilled cheese with chopped chilies, no red meat. He’d know his way around the menu, too: turns out he worked the griddle for two weeks as a teenager, before the commute ate his whole paycheck and he bailed.
The OC, the show or the movie?
The movie, don’t argue. Mike White wrote it, and Andrew swears the Orange County satire cut way too close to home.
Any pianist, living or dead, to share a mezcal with?
Billy Joel, no contest.
Watch Side Quests Episode 1 with Andrew McMahon now on the BroBible YouTube.
Thanks so much for watching, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button to the BroBible YouTube channel while you’re at it.
Now go put some mezcal on your own rider.