And the postcard’s gonna read

Nov 25, 2025, 11 AM

Philatelic Foreword by Jay Bigalke

If you read last last week’s column column, you know I recently was able to verify that a local clerk interceded with a postcard I received and gave an uncanceled stamp its proper due by applying a clean mute cancel after an Informed Delivery image was taken but before the card reached my post office box.

What made that postcard even more memorable, though, wasn’t just the postmark. It was the message. I had the card written out and signed by Andrew McMahon during a VIP meet and greet before his Nov. 6 show in Columbus, Ohio. McMahon, the singer-songwriter known for his work with Something Corporate, Jack’s Mannequin and Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, added a line from one of his songs, Holiday From Real, which reads: “And the postcard’s gonna read …”

That small detail transformed what was already a fascinating postal story into something even more personal. The card had taken a full journey: written and signed by an artist, carried by the Postal Service, scanned digitally for Informed Delivery, and finally hand-canceled at the local level before it landed in my box.

It felt like the universe’s way of connecting two worlds, the tactile and the musical, through one perfectly timed piece of mail.

There’s a reason postcards keep showing up in pop culture. They’re short, visual and sentimental, the analog version of a chorus you can hold in your hand. And when a line from a song ends up traveling through the mail, it becomes a little more alive.

So yes, the stamp got its proper cancel. But what really stayed with me was the lyric that was carried through the process, still legible beneath that neat circular postmark: “And the postcard’s gonna read.”

As an extra bit of fun, I had written the message on a Pantone postcard that was nearly the same shade as Dark Blue, another of McMahon’s songs. It was a simple line on a simple card, but it connected two of my favorite worlds, music and mail, in one small and meaningful way.

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