“ Seven years ago I started making music for a project I called Jack’s Mannequin. I was twenty two years old. I wanted to tell a story. Up til that point the story was pretty interesting. My high school band had become teen idols. We toured and recorded constantly. Eventually things came apart. In my life when things fall apart, things start coming together. I started over. I made a record about breaking up, week long benders and pop music. The next part was unexpected. I got sick, so sick that six years later its the one thing that people talk to me about the most. People called me a lot of things after I got better. A fighter. A hero. An inspiration. I didn’t see it that way. I made a record about that. I hated that record for some time. It was a reminder about what sickness had taken from me… my youth. I love that record now. I thought about not making records after that. I thought about a lot of things. I started writing music. Lots of music. I wanted to talk about the world I lived in. A world where love is not the stuff of greeting cards, but a trench war worth fighting. A world of tenuous connections drifting in and out of relevance. I travelled the country with these songs. I wrote some of them with dear friends. I began recording but something was missing. I started over. I wrote more songs. I moved to the desert with my band and we learned to play them. We returned to L.A. With the help of some very talented friends we committed them once and for all to record. I love this album for what it says and for what it took to get there. And it may not be life and death, but it’s life. It’s my new record and it’s called “People and Things”.