The recording of Jack's Mannequin [ tickets ]'s latest album, "The Glass Passenger," was a period of soul-searching for singer/pianist Andrew McMahon. It was there he learned that not everything needs solving all the time.

"Some things can be left up in the air," McMahon said during an interview with LiveDaily. "I think it's a lesson that maybe I'm always trying to learn. With this album in particular, I had to pit so much of it against my last record (2005's 'Everything in Transit') because the place that the last record took on in my life was so monumental."

"Everything in Transit" marked the first time that the Something Corporate frontman headed out on his own. However, it had a darker connotation as well: in 2005, McMahon was diagnosed with leukemia at the tail end of the mixing process for "Everything in Transit." That summer, he underwent a bone marrow transplant from his sister. "The Glass Passenger," with lyrics like "We're not gonna lie son/you just might die/Get you on that morphine/Drip, drip," tells the tale of his recovery and subsequent moving on. The title of the album reflects that.

"It was a lyric that was found within one of the early songs I had written for the record," McMahon said. "It didn't end up being recorded, to be honest. The lyric made this reference to, 'Keep your eyes on the wheel/I'm the glass passenger.' It's sort of self-referencing at the time. I didn't keep the song, but that lyric, I had a pretty good feeling about that set of words. It speaks to the subject matter of the record, which is: there is an impermanence to life and we don't always get to be the one steering our own ship.

"It could sound like a dark term. But, for me, I think in some ways a lot of the record was about accepting the impermanence of things and the fact that life can change on you rather quickly. You have to bend to it; that's the bigger lesson. Life will not always bend to you."

As the recording and writing process moved on, the term "the glass passenger" took on more of a global meaning.

"We never know when something like [cancer] is going to come up," said McMahon, who now calls his health "excellent." "That 'something' could be anything. It doesn't have to be sickness. It doesn't have to be a bad thing. It can be a good thing. Ultimately, we're not necessarily always in control, I suppose."

McMahon was primarily in control of the creative process for "The Glass Passenger," although, he admitted, he did butt heads a bit with new label Sire/Warner Bros. But now, everyone is "fired up to be working the record." His inability to promote "Everything in Transit" in a timely manner due to his illness affected how he recorded "The Glass Passenger," which was produced by McMahon, Jim Wirt and CJ Eiriksson.

"Me and Jim, we have such a good vibe together and really enjoy making records together. In a lot of respects, because of what happened in the midst of making the last record, in some ways, we feel like it handicapped our ability to sell as many of them as we could have. It was my goal to recreate some of the old elements of what went into that record, so we can hopefully go back and really win on this one."