Jack's Mannequin, a piano-rock outfit fronted by Something Corporate's Andrew McMahon, just released its second album, "The Glass Passenger."

LiveDaily contributor Jed McGowan sat down with the songwriter to discuss the tour, the new album and much more.

[Click here to view video footage of Jack's Mannequin's exclusive LiveDaily Sessions performance.]

You've got a tour launching very soon. You have a new album out September 30. It's been three years since your first album, "Everything in Transit." How are you feeling? Are you excited?

Andrew McMahon: Yeah, I'm feeling really excited. It was a long three years, to say the least, and finally--once we got to digging hard into this record a little over a year ago, I don't think any of us, especially myself, were expecting the amount of work it was going to take and the amount of energy it was going to take to really make this thing good. We fought for it and we worked really hard, and finally to have it seeing the light of day is pretty exciting for us.

I was on your MySpace page and I saw a "Making Of ..." video, a kind of behind-the-scenes on making the album and you had an interesting quote. You said, "It took a village to make this album." Can you explain that?

AM: With this record, unlike the previous record, which was very much a collaboration, it started in a very personal way. We had just put Something Corporate on hiatus and I think I felt very protective of the studio space. When I did "Everything in Transit," it was more about how few people we could have in the studio because I was looking for the safety in that ability to do and say exactly what was on my mind and get to that point, not to say we didn't involve a lot of people from the collaborative sense, but we sort of hatched out the songs quietly and privately, and then, as the necessity came to bring in other musicians, we brought them in after the ideas were shaped, in a lot of ways.

With this record, there was a combination of a lot of things that went on. I was still in the process of--not necessarily the physical recovery from when I'd gotten sick the previous couple years, but more just the emotional and mental recovery of that. There was a huge effort from my band, the band that's been touring with me the past few years, and my producer, Jim Wirt, and co-producer, CJ Eiriksson, and my goal was to make it a very organic and natural-sounding record and step away from some of the more digital approaches to recording music. Obviously, though, we're using Pro Tools and we're doing all those things, but we wanted to make it feel played and not chopped up and doctored, so it took having a lot of people in the room and getting a lot of opinions and really bouncing things off of a lot of people to accomplish that sound.

I think the musicians and the production staff--at any given point, there were probably six or seven people sitting in a really small control room going, "What do you think?" I think all the people who were involved with "Everything in Transit" were all looking for a little justice on this record, to some extent. I got sick before "Transit" came out and we felt like that record should have blown up, so, in a way, everybody who ended up becoming involved in that record, even in its aftermath, became the village that pushed "The Glass Passenger" along.

It must feel great to have all these people helping you along.

AM: Yeah, [but] sometimes it can be overwhelming, too. I think there were definitely moments where it became too much and you have to learn to manage that. You get to a point where you starting really valuing people's opinions and then sometimes you stop listening to your own intuition. I think there were definitely moments in the record where I would put the brakes on and go hide out in the studio alone and just listen and see where my head was at without feedback and try and shape things after all of the input had come in. But, ultimately, I think it was this large group--not just from the production and music side but also from the label side and management side and even friends and family, these things really played a huge role in facilitating what became this album.

Tell me about your songwriting process. Do you always start with the piano or lyrics?

AM: It changes every time. I always say that maybe the reason that I enjoy this job the most and enjoy being a writer is because it doesn't really have an exact form or an exact structure and there's this sort of whimsical element to it and it doesn't come always in a particular way. I think the one constant is that something triggers the gut, I say. All of a sudden you'll feel a song rising inside, whether it's a lyrical idea or maybe I'll hear a melodic idea in my head or I'll be sitting at the piano just playing around and stumble across something that sparks that energy, and once that energy is sparked ... I always write at the piano, so I'll end up at the piano hashing it out. I usually do the combination of the words, the melodies and the instrumentation, usually all at the same time. Sometimes, I don't have access to the piano and I'll write ideas and melodies in my head once I have things going on and I'll record them in my phone and then do them again [on piano]. It really does always come back to the piano.

How autobiographical are these songs?

AM: I think largely. I'm always careful to say that it's pure autobiography, because a lot of times you try and use symbolism to tell a true story but maybe the story itself isn't the story. I think they're all representative of ideas and various different scenarios and situations that have come up in my life throughout the course of time that I recorded and, more specifically, some of the stuff from the past that I don't think I had hashed out because I didn't really have the ability to when I wasn't well. Writing songs just wasn't at the top of my list of priorities, but there were a lot of those songs ... as a writer, I use songs to help me sort through the contents of my head and try to level myself out. I think, with this record, I was sort of forced to go backwards and do some of those things as well.

Let's switch things up and talk about your live show. Your headlining tour kicks off in mid-October and you were busy this summer playing with Paramore and Vans Warped festivals. How were those?

AM: They were great. Both tours were awesome. It was hard being out on the road knowing and playing a lot of this older material after a couple of years--being on the road playing it, knowing that we had this new catalog and stockpile back home that we hadn't really had time to rehearse because we'd been on the road so much. There were elements of it where you'd almost feel like you were in traction or something, like you were stuck in one place, not exactly moving forward. There were those moments, but, truthfully, we couldn't have asked for better tours. We had so many friends out there, people that we'd met over the years, and then once we got on Paramore, we were out there with Phantom Planet, who are guys that I've known over the course of the years, so it was great to be out with friends and getting back into the consciousness of some of these fans and people who maybe haven't seen as much of us lately because we've really been under a rock recording so much.

Have you tested out new material at the shows?

AM: Yeah, we ended up doing anywhere from one to three songs a night. While we were doing the support stuff and the Warped tour, it was usually one song or so, and we'd just throw it out there, just because people didn't really have access to the material--and, again, we didn't have time to practice a lot of this stuff before we left for those tours, but then we would break off from the Paramore tour occasionally when they would split to go do a radio show or something that we weren't attached to, and work up songs in sound check and debut them in headliners. That was always really fulfilling, to be with our crowd, who are obviously pretty passionate about what we do, and get to debut [the songs] to them. That's where they made most of their debuts, in front of our crowd.

The "Hammers and Strings" tour kicks off in mid-October. What do you have in store for this tour?

AM: I have no idea! We're neck deep in the rehearsal process right now. Originally, I had this grand plan to try to do the record start to finish. That was the thought, and it's still a possibility. We've basically gone through and learned all the material. We're taking a few days off and then we're going to go back in now that we've learned it and really start refining it down. Once we get to that place, then we'll start running sets and see if the front to back idea works. If not, it will be focused almost entirely on "The Glass Passenger." That's why we made a point to go into these smaller clubs where the idea would be that the most avid fans, the ones who mostly likely already have the album and know the material and are fired up on the new stuff, would be able to enjoy it in a really personal environment. It seemed ambitious to go take on 3,000 seat venues and play 14 new songs. When you start doing that, you start getting people who are coming because they heard the one song off the last record. I wanted this to be about those fans who are just so passionate that they went out and got their tickets right away and wanted to experience it in an intimate environment. It'll be mainly focused on the new record but we'll of course throw a couple of things in from the old record, maybe a Something Corporate song or a cover here and there. It kind of depends. That's the beauty of the club tour. You have that spontaneous thing that can drive it.