A Tale of Two Cities: Dan Mangan finds the same connection in Prince Albert and Saskatoon
by Scott Roos
Prince Albert pics by Scott Roos
Saskatoon pics by Rachel Gibson
There are two very different ways to experience Dan Mangan. In Prince Albert, he stood on the stage of the EA Rawlinson Centre for the Arts in front of a relatively small, subdued audience. A few nights later, in Saskatoon, at the venerable Broadway Theatre, he walked into a sold-out room filled with people who knew the words to just about everything he played. Two cities. Two very different crowds. But the same Mangan.
That might have been the most interesting thing about seeing Mangan perform in both places. He didn’t seem to change who he was to suit the size of the room. He simply adjusted to it, allowing the intimate setting in Prince Albert to bring out one side of his personality and the larger, rowdier Saskatoon crowd to bring out another.
“I do not take it for granted,” Mangan told me before the shows. “And so whether there's 50 people or there's 5,000 people or whatever, at this point in my career, like, I've seen the ups and downs.”
That attitude was evident in both performances.
Before Mangan took the stage in Prince Albert, songwriter Micah Erenberg of The Secret Beach opened with a short set that felt almost criminally brief. Erenberg has a wonderfully warm stage presence, delivering his dry, understated humour between songs while moving easily between witty material such as “22” and the more emotionally resonant “God Is.”
His voice can be earnest and direct, but he also knows how to pull back, lowering the volume and drawing the audience toward him rather than pushing his way into the room.
Erenberg was compelling in both Saskatchewan shows, though the smaller Rawlinson audience seemed particularly suited to his intimate approach. There was a sense in Prince Albert that the people in the room knew they were getting something a little different when it came to Erenberg.
Mangan himself acknowledged the appeal of playing smaller communities when we spoke before the tour.
“I kind of said to my agent that I was interested in going a little bit deeper in general in a lot of parts of Canada,” he said. “We're doing a lot of small-town shows.”
That was certainly the case in Prince Albert, where Mangan brought the songs from his latest album, Natural Light, to a room considerably smaller than the one waiting for him in Saskatoon. “It Might Be Raining,” “Cut the Brakes” and “Melody” all found their place in the set, but eventually Mangan began taking requests from the audience. And then he just kept playing them. And playing them...
That was the charm of the evening. There was no sense that Mangan needed to manufacture a big concert experience for a smaller crowd. His gentle, laid-back personality was enough. There was warmth in his interaction with the audience, and the smaller room gave that warmth room to breathe.
“I’m bewildered in general, you know, that I can go anywhere outside of my hometown and have people singing lyrics back at me,” Mangan said. “It never gets old.”
In Prince Albert, the appreciation was quieter, but no less genuine.
A night later, the scene was considerably different. Mangan’s Saskatoon show was a sellout, something he admitted he had never previously accomplished at the Broadway Theatre, at least not days in advance, anyway. At one point in the show, he reminisced about playing places such as Amigos and the Capitol and the gradual process of working his way up through Saskatoon’s music scene.
This time, the audience was much more of a character in the show. The stage banter became louder and more raucous, but when Mangan began playing, the room snapped into focus. There was an unmistakable feeling that a significant portion of the audience had been following him for years. They sang with him. They anticipated songs. And when the familiar ones arrived, they didn’t need much encouragement to join in.
The Natural Light material that had sounded intimate in Prince Albert took on a different energy in Saskatoon. The songs were still recognizably Mangan’s. They were warm, thoughtful and often quietly emotional but now in a few cases, they had hundreds of voices wrapped around them. That difference seemed to delight rather than overwhelm him.
Mangan moved freely between newer material and songs from throughout his career, eventually ending the night with “Basket” and “Robot.” At one point he left the stage entirely, venturing into the audience to perform a few songs while precariously balancing on two theatre seats. It was exactly the sort of thing that could have become a calculated “big concert moment.” Instead, it felt like Dan being Dan.
The same was true when he revealed that he had written a brand-new song in the venue’s green room. He had typed the lyrics into his phone and proceeded to perform the song for the first time, occasionally peering down at the screen. It was brilliant. There was something particularly fitting about seeing that spontaneous moment in a packed theatre. For all the years Mangan has spent making records, touring and building an audience, there was still room for a song to appear out of nowhere and be played for the first time that night.
That sense of freedom is something Mangan connected to the making of Natural Light. The album came together during an impromptu six-day gathering at a cabin with friends and collaborators, initially without even the intention of making a record.
“We kind of emerged from this, you know, from this other region going, ‘Oh, we just made this really special thing,’” he told me.
He described the experience as one in which the pressure disappeared.
“I felt zero fear. I felt just joy.”
There was a similar lack of calculation in his Saskatchewan performances. In Prince Albert, Mangan didn’t try to turn a smaller crowd into a larger one. In Saskatoon, he didn’t try to contain a larger crowd into something more intimate than it wanted to be. He simply responded to the room. That adaptability may be one of the most underrated qualities of a live performer. It isn't necessarily about knowing how to play to 50 people or 5,000 people. It is about understanding that those audiences require different things without losing yourself in the process. Mangan seemed to understand that instinctively.
“I’ve sort of scraped the bottom, and also, you know, I’ve been able to do some really incredible stuff,” he told me. “I’ve been very lucky and fortunate. So at this point I’m just like, it’s all gravy.”
That might be the best way to describe the two Saskatchewan shows. For the Prince Albert audience, it was a chance to experience an accomplished Canadian songwriter in a room where the distance between performer and audience felt particularly small. And Mangan seemed equally comfortable with both. There was no inflated rock-star persona in either room. No attempt to become a different version of himself because the circumstances demanded it. Just Dan. Quietly funny. Warm. Thoughtful. Occasionally precarious on theatre seats. And, when the moment called for it, very good at reminding a room full of people why they had come to see him in the first place.
“I kind of just care less, honestly,” Mangan told me when we talked about where he is in his career now. “My own keeping score of how effectively I am, you know, creating things that I think are meaningful matters more to me.”
After two nights in Saskatchewan, it is easy to understand why that approach works.
In Prince Albert, the connection was intimate. In Saskatoon, it was communal. But the essential thing remained the same: Mangan trusted the songs, trusted himself and let the room be what it was.
A tale of two cities, perhaps.
But, in the case of these two shows, only one Dan Mangan.
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