Stories, Sing-Alongs, and a Song for Katie: Andrew McMahon at the Kessler Theater

The Kessler Theater, Dallas, November 8, 2026

Picture a sold-out room in Dallas, one man at a piano, and every single person in the building singing along to every single word. It sounded like singing in your car when you think nobody's listening, except everybody was listening, and everybody was singing, and the whole room sounded like one big, tender voice.

I stood at the top of the stairs at the Kessler Theater, three and a half hours from home, crying so quietly I'm pretty sure nobody noticed (everyone else was busy loving the same songs I was). In front of my eyes was Andrew McMahon, bantering and laughing with the crowd at the Kessler. He had stuck on a sparkly gemstone on his cheek and had a brown sweater tied around his shoulders.

Before he ever walked out on Sunday, November 8, for the sold-out Dallas stop of his "An Evening with Andrew McMahon and His Piano" tour, the people around me were passing stories about Andrew back and forth like worn-out photographs. How kind he is. How warm he is. How he takes his time with people. I stood there in awe of how much love was in that room.

I came into that theater carrying a whole chapter of my life. In my early 20s, when everything felt uncertain and a little scary, I had memorized every song on "Everything in Transit" and "The Glass Passenger" and sang them on the Riverwalk in San Antonio to earn a couple of dollars to eat each night. Those two albums were the handrail I held onto that helped me see through some of the scariest times of my life. So hearing a whole room echo each song back as Andy sang, in a theater full of people brimming with eagerness and a sense of anticipation, it truly felt like the world quietly paused and held itself suspended in time, an escape from the calamity of adult life's chores, the nightmare beyond the doors.

Nah, for those few hours we were all free from those anxieties and responsibilities. We were all just some teenagers with Something Corporate on our minds, Jack's Mannequin on our lips, and we were fresh out of The Wilderness for a moment.

But let's go back to the beginning, okay? I'm ready.

Ivory Layne

You know, before the doors even officially opened, Ivory Layne had me hooked. I was browsing her website before we got started and noticed she had an interactive "solve-the-setlist" style crossword, and you know damn well I never back down from a challenge. It was such a fun way to get to know her music and her planned setlist, and honestly, it felt like I was being invited to join in the fun long before I saw her walk across the stage.

Then she walked out and opened the night, and the puzzle came to life. She came out in fringed white boots, a zip-up blue jacket, and these super cute white-and-blue floral shorts, with her frizzy, powerful red hair cascading around her in curly chaos. I spied glitter around her eyes, and she seemed positively radiant as she waved hello to the crowd. She's said that anyone who loves "big choruses, big hair, and big feelings" is welcome in her world, and the hair and the feelings were both on full display.

Ivory told her life story through her songs, and she had a sparkle that made the whole room lean in. She's witty, warm, and genuinely funny, and she's electric on the piano. Every story left me hooked on what came next. The Nashville-based singer-songwriter, who grew up in Denver, North Carolina, has Something Corporate's "Death Grip" on her co-writing résumé, and her 2026 singles include "Skim" and "Saint," which arrived this summer with the hook "You make my ex look like a saint."

Her stories poked fun at her own love life, from the boy she wrote songs about to the long, winding road of trying to build a music career, and they land harder once you know the history. Ivory grew up in tiny Denver, North Carolina, wanting to be a pastor, wrote her first song at six, and moved to Nashville in 2013 to pursue music seriously. She also knows the other side of the dream. The title of her 2025 EP, "Part Time Jobs Near Me," is a Google search she ran countless times, writing songs by day and hunting for jobs at night, and she eventually sold her car to finish it. She turned all of that into songs about the music industry like "Mehtropolis" and "ASMR." So hearing her laugh about the hard years from the stage felt like watching a friend finally get to tell the punchline.

Her set flew by, and I'd have happily stayed for another hour. Lucky for me, she came back later in the night to join Andrew on a few songs.

You can check out her fabulous music below, and I hope you find yourself as entertained and entranced as I was!

Andrew McMahon

Now, I want to do this set justice. There were two major components to this: "The Crowd" and "The Experience." Let's start with the crowd, because, as you can recall, this was a sold-out show, and from what I could tell, this isn't a one-off thing. Andrew McMahon regularly sells out venues, and fans are incredibly eager to snap up any spot they can get to sing with him.

Before Andrew even walked out, I started talking to people around me, and almost every one of them was a repeat show-goer. One woman told me she'd seen him 50 times and was planning on heading to Colorado within the next 5 days for his next show with strings. That's when I realized how big, loyal, and widespread this fanbase is.

"The Experience," as best I can succinctly describe it, felt like a story. I found out that Andrew doesn't really pre-plan the setlist until roughly an hour before showtime because he builds it around whatever theme he wants to explore that night. During a momentary pause between songs, Andrew told us,

"I just want to thank you guys, because you give me the freedom to play songs that I don't get to play as often, and I really enjoy this."

Interwoven between each melody, Andrew gave us pieces of himself cut up with plenty of heartwarming laughs. He told us that when he was eighteen, recording Something Corporate's first album, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were recording down the hall, and it was a huge struggle for him to not just go peek over to see what they were up to. He laughed about how Tom eventually propped the door open so the guys could hear them jamming, and how much joy it brought him to be recording in the same building.

He spoke about wanting to be a rockstar so badly and to succeed as a writer, and how the moment he felt the dream may come true, he sat down and penned "The Astronaut." He laughed as he began, "I Woke Up In a Car!" He joked, "Is it too early to play this song? Play the hits up front, that's what everybody wants.... Nah, it's all B-sides from here on out!" and laughed as he dove back into the melody with the crowd singing alongside him.

While waiting for Ivory to join him, we went off on a banter about a bombed film featuring Channing Tatum and how Andy himself was approached about writing a song for the film and subsequently playing the singer in the film. He was so excited about this prospect he said he wrote the whole thing so quickly and had Bobby "translate the piano parts to guitar parts," but somewhere along the way the director wound up making the movie without the song ("Restless Dream")... and without him. Ivory had joined him on stage by this time, and the duo happily serenaded us with three songs together and let us in on lots of fun little moments between them.

The quietest moment came when Andrew began talking about “There, There Katie.” He wrote the song for his sister, who he called his best friend and his protector. He described their relationship the way most siblings would, with stretches of closeness and stretches of distance, but when he first got sick, Katie was the first person by his side. He told us she was a 10/10 bone marrow match and that his doctor had said that if the transplant worked, it would be the thing that cured him. He admitted he hesitated to ask her. But once he walked her through the risks and everything the procedure would involve, she was in right away and told him, in her words, "Let's get this shit done."

As a thank you, he gave her "There, There Katie" the morning of the transplant. That transplant happened on August 23, 2005, the same day "Everything in Transit" was released.

Earlier in the night, a parent in the front row asked whether Andrew would play their kid’s favorite song. (There were so many children in the crowd with their parents!) He said it depended on the song, since he’d hate to disappoint a child if it wasn’t already on the setlist. That request led to “Fire Escape” being moved up and swapped with “Bruised,” which was cut altogether. As the main set wound down, he played “Globes and Maps” and followed it with “Cecilia and the Satellite,” a last-minute swap from the printed setlist (goodbye Bruised). Once the song finished up, Andrew took a bow and waved as he headed off stage...

...only to quickly come bounding back out for the encore. He joked about a recurring dream he has where he waits too long to come out, and as he steps on stage, the hall is half empty and people are mildly surprised he's back out, and he feels worried sometimes the applause wouldn't warrant his return to sing a few more songs. We laughed with him as he seated himself back down, and he led us into "Walking By," which he described as a song about having fallen in love with his sister's best friend, Kelly, who would one day become his wife. He told us he wrote the entire song on the back of a napkin at a bar he frequented, and he wanted so badly to convince her that he was a good match for her.

By the end, we had a harmonica apparatus strapped over his head, and he finished out with "La La Lie." Everything he did that night added up to the same picture. Between every song he gave a piece of himself, heartfelt and funny in equal measure, describing what went into each one and where he was in his life when he wrote it, and you can tell how much he cares about the people in the room. The kindness everyone had been telling me about before the show was right there on stage, in how he talked about Katie, Kelly, and the 18-year-old who wanted this dream so badly he wrote a song about it.

So What's Next?

Andrew told us he's working on new music and that all he wants is to make a record he loves and get it to people. He grumbled about marketing budgets that mean someone yelling at you to make more TikToks and said personal connection matters most now. He joked he wants the new record to travel like chain mail, forwarded to ten friends, and might even name it that.

Final Thoughts, My Dudes

I came in as a lifelong fan, and I left feeling like I'd been told a story by an old friend who happened to play the piano while we were chatting. If you missed this one, you missed a night where the stories mattered as much as the songs. If he comes anywhere near you, go. I swear it'll be the best thing you do for yourself.

We're working on a sit-down with Andrew, so stay tuned. <3