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" Andrew McMahon, singer and pianist of Jack&amp;#039;s Mannequin, has a documentary called Dear Jack coming out on November 3. We spoke to him about the documentary, which chronicles his experiences in Jack&amp;#039;s Mannequin as well as surviving leukemia. He also told us about his latest tour and what he thinks about the Twilight craze!  17: What made you decide to create the documentary? Andrew McMahon: It wasn&amp;#039;t in the process of filming anything that we thought of making a documentary. I had gotten this video camera from Maverick, who signed Jack&amp;#039;s Mannequin originally when I was making the record. It was at that point I started filming. It just coincided with this time in my life when I was in that big period of time that led to the first Jack&amp;#039;s record, so I started filming everything. I carried this camera with me everywhere I went. It wasn&amp;#039;t really intended to come out. When I got sick I already had this pre-existing relationship with this video camera that I had been unloading my daily life on. A couple of my friends who were close to me throughout the process when I was sick knew that I had filmed a lot. It was several months after I started recovering that they said &amp;quot;we know you have these tapes, we know we filmed it, is there a way you&amp;#039;ll let us look at it and put it together?&amp;quot; Their angle on it \u2014 because it was captured in such an honest way and that it was sort of accidental was that it would give people a pretty honest look at what it was like and a first-person perspective on it. 17: What else is in the documentary? AM: Interview footage. They took my movies of the making of Everything in Transit and the hatching period of Jack&amp;#039;s into the illness and a little bit of the recovery as well. We did tons of interviews, but ultimately they got boiled down to the closest people in the process. 17: What do you hope that people will gain from seeing it? AM: I think one, just the inherent idea of hope in a hard place. In some ways, I cross my fingers that somehow on a level with patients or with survivors or with families who are coping with it, that it might be some insight into that window. I think it might be a really powerful thing, as far as for a survivor, maybe in the aftermath to know there&amp;#039;s somebody who you can relate to you. And the fact that it has a happy ending, I think it hammers home that you can survive this thing. 17: How is the new tour? AM: The idea was to chase the documentary and do acoustic dates along the way to hopefully raise a little bit of extra money for the charity [Stand Up For Cancer]. The money we make from the screenings is going back to the charity. The goal was to get out on the road, do some small shows. We stripped it down. It&amp;#039;s been a dress down thing, it&amp;#039;s just me and a piano, and I&amp;#039;ve got my guitar player out there doing acoustic. 17: How is The Glass Passenger a departure from your previous album? AM: I think fundamentally, the writing on this record served as a little bit of a reconciliation of things past. Usually it tends to be very in the moment, and I think because, as this record related back to me getting sick, a lot of those times I didn&amp;#039;t get to move through that experience because I didn&amp;#039;t have the spirit at that time to write those songs. So I was kind of writing backwards, which is tricky 17: Stephanie Meyers loves you \u2014 she said your music inspired her while writing Eclipse! Have you read the Twilight books? AM: I read the first one, and I thought it was great. Stephanie is great. And she really came in and saved our first video, &amp;quot;The Resolution.&amp;quot; We decided to find an author, or someone creative who could give us something different and Stephanie came to mind because I had heard she was into the band. And I didn&amp;#039;t really know anything about Twilight. She really helped us reach a new audience. Stephanie did a really cool thing for us, in the sense that we got to reach back out to a younger audience. 17: Are you psyched for you New Moon? AM:  I&amp;#039;ve seen the first one. I just think it&amp;#039;s cool that there&amp;#039;s someone out there that&amp;#039;s really getting young people into reading books. It&amp;#039;s cool that it&amp;#039;s cool to read again, and I think that that&amp;#039;s a really powerful thing that she&amp;#039;s brought back to culture. It&amp;#039;s killer that somebody&amp;#039;s motivating young people to read, I love it. Check back soon for exclusive video footage of Jack&amp;#039;s Mannequin&amp;#039;s private performance for Seventeen! Are you going to see Dear Jack? Are you into Jack&amp;#039;s Mannequin? Sound off in the comments! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/a6147/jacks-mannequin-interview/>