Something Corporate Return to Studio

For all you fans stoked about seminal Orange County alt-pop act Something Corporate reuniting for the first time in five years to headline the second day of Bamboozle on March 28, we have some more good news: The band—who blew up in 2002 with the smash “If You C Jordan”—spent the last week of January in a Santa Monica recording studio. 

“We basically went back with this idea that we would kind of revisit a couple of demos that we never really ended up putting on the first two [Something Corporate] records, but that we still loved and that we always wanted to get to,” says piano-playing front man Andrew McMahon, seated on a metal folding chair at the rehearsal space for his other band, Jack’s Mannequin, at Mates Studio in North Hollywood. “So, there’s a song by Josh [Partington], my guitar player, called ‘Wait,’ which we played acoustic before, but we went in and figured we’d do a full-band version.  

“We did ‘Wait,’ and then did an old song of mine called ‘Letters to Noelle,’” he continues. “We went back into the studio sort of with the idea that we wouldn’t be bringing in brand-new material so we could get it done quickly and not have to do a bunch of preproduction and stuff. We just hung out in the studio for a week. First time we had been in a studio together in, God, probably four or five years.”

The demo versions of “Wait” and “Letters to Noelle” originally appeared on the super-obscure Galaxy Sessions EP, which McMahon gave away to those members of the band’s mailing list who sold more than five tickets to the band’s May 11, 2001, show at the House of Blues. Something Corporate became the first unsigned OC band to sell out the Anaheim venue. 

The freshly recorded versions of those songs will appear on an as-yet-untitled Something Corporate “best of” compilation scheduled for release on Universal Music Enterprises in late April or early May. The 27-year-old singer/songwriter wrote much of the material for the upcoming comp as a teenager. “It was definitely a trip down memory lane,” he says. “Definitely a lot of, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe I said that.’

“For the most part, it has been a celebration for us, in a way,” McMahon continues. “To have the four of us back together and just interacting on that level, putting things together for a record and getting ready to do a show—it’s been exciting. It’s been fun. It’s been a good way for us to kind of, I think, in some ways, mend some fences from the time when we didn’t completely reconcile.” 

wtatangelo@ocweekly.com

Portions of this column were previously posted to the Heard Mentality blog.