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Something Corporate’s “Konstantine,” penned by singer-songwriter Andrew McMahon, was well-known in the early 2000s Myspace scene as THE heartbreak anthem. The 10-minute, piano-heavy ballad is so intense, McMahon told MTV News he rarely performs it anymore. Despite this, it’s not his most challenging song to date — that honor goes to “Caves” by Jack’s Mannequin.

You see, McMahon — who started Jack’s Mannequin in 2004 after ending Something Corporate — was diagnosed with Acute Lymphatic Leukemia, the most common childhood cancer, at age 22. The band’s debut record, Everything in Transit (2005), came out the same day he received a stem cell transplant from his sister.

McMahon made a full recovery, and his experiences in cancer treatment partly inspired The Glass Passenger (2008). He called “Caves,” the album’s 13th track, the most difficult song he’s ever written.

“It was the moment where I said, OK, I’m going to address the fact that I’d gotten sick in the years prior to making this record. I realized that I had been avoiding the subject matter,” McMahon explained. “Each verse is like a different scene from the hospital that I was in, and then the end is kind of like this triumphant breaking through to the other side.”

His struggles motivated him to found the Dear Jack Foundation in 2006, one year after his life-changing stem cell transplant. You can hear more about McMahon’s personal journey in the organization’s 10th anniversary video.

Dear Jack provides cancer patients with college scholarships, resources, and funds to achieve their dreams. The goal is to “get people out of the hospital and into survivorship in a healthy way,” McMahon said.

Andrew McMahon has had many faces in the music industry — the singer-songwriter began his career by fronting the early 2000s pop punk band Something Corporate, then transitioned to alternative group Jack’s Mannequin, before releasing his solo album Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness , using the LP’s name as his stage moniker as well, in 2014. Now, McMahon is preparing his second release for Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, and he tells EW, “I think this record’s going to be the best I’ve ever made.”

“I actually just took the subway over from the studio and I’ll be taking it back as soon as I’m done,” McMahon told EW on the red carpet at Live Nation’s National Concert Day.

So what can fans expect from this new album? McMahon teased that he’s experimenting with different genres for the collection, which has allowed him to create what he described as a “completely new evolution I haven’t done before.”

“This sort of globalization of music and the way that genres have finally just like blended, it’s freed up so much space in the studio to just experiment with sounds that I think would’ve been taboo before,” McMahon said. “I was working on a track and was like ‘I want to hear a disco string that reminds me of ‘Billie Jean,’ and there was a time when I probably wouldn’t have been able to utter those words in a studio and get away with it… I think there’s a freedom in this process right now, and I’ve had so much time to write and work on songs for this record that we’ve really curated it down to this batch that link up and have a lot of heart, and I feel really good about them.”

Last night I saw Jack’s Mannequin perform the entirety of Everything in Transit for the album’s 10 year anniversary. That record was my summer playlist when I was a teenager. The songs played over the PA before and between sets were mainly from bands 10 years ago as well. Nostalgia hitting hard.