Music, Style & Culture

Dan Mangan: ‘Spit It Out And See What Happens’

Following up a Polaris Prize nominated album - a record that shot you to the forefront of your home country's attention - is never an easy task...

Following up a Polaris Prize nominated album - a record that shot you to the forefront of your home country's attention - is never an easy task, but it's one that faced Dan Mangan when he began to write his latest LP.  A more dynamic and perhaps comprehensive record than sophomore effort 'Nice, Nice, Very Nice', 'Oh Fortune' seeps with maturity, questioning Mangan's existence through a rollercoaster of rhythms, textures and emotions.  

DIY grabbed Dan during one of his rare UK appearances to talk about his latest release, his tumultuous relationship with touring and his future plans. 

'Oh Fortune' was released in Europe this week, how does it feel to finally have something over here to tie you to the UK a bit more?
It's really nice to have a label home in Europe. For a lot of years - and with the first two records - they were a little bit out in Europe, they were available online and stuff but never really properly released. City Slang are a great label and a great home and I'm really excited to be working with them.

It's your third album and reactions to it so far have cited it as 'ambitious' and quite a 'departure' from your earlier work. What do you make of that?
I agree. I think it's quite a bit different to the last two records. And purposefully so! It's been very important for me to feel like I'm pushing myself and reaching beyond what I already know, and that comes into play in terms of who's in the band and stuff like that. I've always wanted to pull in players that weren't just going to do what I told them but who would actually bring their own flavour of creativity to it; people who came from a place in music that I find inspirational. The band's formed into what it is now over the years and it's got a dynamic sound. I feel like this is the record that I wanted to make every time I made a record so now it feels like fruition of instinct.

You mentioned the band there, and this record was more of a collaborative effort than the previous two. What do you think the collaborations bring to the album?
Just the performances, there's a lot of musicians play on it. I'm very fortunate that there's some incredible musicians in Vancouver and people who are really in tune with their instruments. And working with Colin Stewart the producer was fantastic. We both have a similar musical vocabulary, and the way that we express and talk about music is really very copasetic so we can work and fall into a group quite easily.
We pulled in a guy called Eyvind Kang from Seattle to do the arrangements. He's just one of those musical-mind-genius types. He's worked with Beck and Bill Frisell, and people in the pop world but also people in the totally out there jazz world - Marc Ribot and John Zorn and so on - people that I respect quite a lot. He's fantastic, I really enjoyed working with him. He brought a lot to the arrangements on the record. I didn't really know which direction these songs were going to go previous to being in the studio and that's part of the fun, not knowing what it's going to be, and just trying a whole bunch of different things and seeing what sticks and what feels good. Often you end up with something that you couldn't have predicted but whatever it is, that's what it is. So you learn to love it regardless.

Your last album 'Nice, Nice, Very Nice' was a great success and attracted you a Polaris nomination amongst other things. Did that have any influence on the writing or recording process of 'Oh Fortune' at all?
Not a lot, actually. It's funny because that record did a lot more than anyone ever expected it to, and it opened a lot of doors for us. My life changed completely over the space of a couple of years, going from small little bars to big theatres back in Canada so it was a really magical time, and it was based on that record slowly getting around and more people hearing it. This time around, I wasn't so much worried about living up to that record as wanting to really surpass it in a lot of ways. That record is very special to me in that it encapsulated a lot of my life in making that and then touring it but I also really had a desire to reach into something else. All of my favourite bands are seemingly different with every single record they make so why not follow that path rather than trying to replicate something that seemed to work? Because that's just going to be disingenuous. You want it to be honest, more than anything.

Your records are always quite an honest portrait. I'd hate to use the word vulnerable but it does seem to fit. Is that something that's important to you?
I think it's ok to be. There's a fear of being deep. As soon as something's trying to be deep then it's soft or then people get on it for being just fluffy stuff. But to me, if you're going to dedicate your life to being a musician and you're going to dedicate your life to something that is not deep, then your life is going to surround something that is very candy-coated. You want to aim for something that's really meaningful, or at least I do. I can't really speak to whether or not we hit that target but I can speak to what the intention is. And the intention is just to do what is honestly me and indicative of my process and my evolution and to take into account all of my influences, spit it out on a page and see what happens.

You wrote this record when you were on the road, and you've been touring pretty constantly for the last three years. You seem to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with touring, do you think that's reflected in the record?
I mostly love it. I think the deal is that we've just been doing so much of it. We've toured for ten months of this year. And that's a lot. I just feel exhausted a lot of the time, and that's not really a healthy mind set to be in. But being on stage is something that I adore, and it doesn't matter how exhausted and how totally fucked up you are in however many ways, if you get on stage and you play your heart out and the crowd responds and everything's going then there's this kind of energy in the room that just makes up for all of it. You can be so tired getting on stage and then getting off stage, you're so wired from the adrenaline rush that you can't sleep so it's an up and down battle, touring. You're cranky and low and tired and then you play a show and then everything's amazing and then you party and celebrate and then the next day is the same thing. It's the highs and lows of life magnified into a very small, little bubble.

While we're talking about being on stage, you recently wrote a column on magical gig moments for the Guardian. What's the best performance you've ever seen from someone else?
That's a good question. I don't even know if I can answer that. When somebody is so unbelievably in their skin and in that moment. There was a moment – and I'm not going to say that this is the best moment I've ever seen – but we were playing a folk festival in Canada and KD Lang was playing and it's strange because KD Lang was a popstar when I was a kid and she was on the radio, not particularly music that I listened to or knew of but she came out on stage with such a force and blew me away. I was not expecting it. Just her voice and her control but also her ability to just live through what she was singing was just remarkable. I'm not wanting to rank it amongst other performances I've seen but in my mind right now, that's a memorable one. You know when you're seeing something that's really powerful and time kind of stops and you're not thinking of anything else, you're not checking your phone or anything, you're just there? That was it for me. It totally caught me off guard.

I wanted to ask about your live set up. Everyone put a lot of effort into the album but do you have all of the contributors on the road with you? Is it important to you to try to replicate the record on the road?
The touring band changes quite a bit. Sometimes we're just a quartet, right now we're just a four-piece, but we often tour with another trumpet player called J P Carter and sometimes we tour with a keyboard player named Tyson Naylor. When we play at home in Vancouver, often we'll put on a big production with a 15-piece band, a full horn line and strings, and we go for it in that way but it changes. I'm not too concerned with recreating the album. I feel like the album is what it is and that was the result of a lot of hard work. The album is never going to change but when we take the songs on the road, the songs change night to night, and depending on what musicians we have with us, they're going to differ, and I'm totally ok with that. I'm of the school of thought that a band need not reproduce the record exactly. They can take liberties and use the live show as a platform to be spontaneous.

The show you played last night (8th December) was the End Of The Road Christmas show. Do you have any festivals booked in for next year in the UK?
I don't know actually which ones we'll be doing. I hope we can come back and do a bunch. England does festivals really well. I think there's a great festival culture here and obviously Glastonbury, we've done that the last couple of years but that's off. That's a bit of a relief. That's an amazing festival but it is the most gruelling thing you'll ever do.

Do you have any concrete plans for next year?
After this little trip here in December, I've got two months off and I desperately need it so I'm really looking forward to that. And then back to Australia, back here in April, in the States in March and then more festivals. Back and forth between Europe and the United States all year. Just touring. I could get into the specifics but I think it just comes down to touring a lot for the next while and just continuing what we've been doing. It's been a good life for the last couple of years and I'm just trying to figure out what the next step is.

Dan Mangan's third album 'Oh Fortune' is available now via City Slang.