Jack’s Mannequin: Caves

“Caves” is the only Jack’s Mannequin song to directly address his hospitalization. McMahon rockets up and out of himself and then drops back in suddenly, microscopically, into emerging bone: “And out here I watch the sun circle the earth / Marrows collide in rebirth.” The song follows him, into and out of bombast, gravity shifting. The enormity of his diagnosis, the smallness of the error in his body. A year from his hospitalization he wrote on his blog, “While I’m so thankful for every moment I am alive, I have to admit that at this second I feel more vulnerable to the world around me than I could ever put into words. It is an intense thing to feel so connected to the ground I am walking on and still feel so temporary.”

I wrote about the Jack’s Mannequin show at Irving Plaza last night. They played a song about being hospitalized for acute lymphatic leukemia.