Dan Mangan is taking the long way through Saskatchewan this October

by Scott Roos

photos by Tracy Creighton (Copperblue Photography and Design)

There is something wonderfully Canadian about Dan Mangan taking the long way. The Vancouver singer-songwriter could have simply crossed Saskatchewan off the itinerary with a stop in Regina or Saskatoon. Instead, when Mangan and his booking agent started talking about getting a little deeper into Canada, he looked at the map and decided to wander.

The result is a four-show Saskatchewan run that will take him from Prince Albert to Saskatoon, then southwest to Swift Current before wrapping up in Regina.

Mangan plays the E.A. Rawlinson Centre for the Arts in Prince Albert on Thursday, Oct. 1, followed by the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon on Friday, Oct. 2, Living Sky Casino in Swift Current on Saturday, Oct. 3, and Darke Hall in Regina on Sunday, Oct. 4. For Mangan, the Saskatchewan dates are more than a convenient string of bookings.

“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 in an interview with NSMZ. “We're doing a lot of small-town shows.”

Mangan has spent more than two decades building a career that has taken him from intimate rooms to major festivals and venues, earning two JUNO Awards and three Polaris Music Prize nominations along the way. His latest record, Natural Light, however, came from about as far away from the machinery of the modern music industry as you can get.

A cabin. A lake. Four friends. Six days. And, initially, no intention whatsoever of making an album.

“When we went there, we didn't think we were going to make a record,” Mangan said. “We thought maybe we would do some demoing.”

He had studio time booked in a more conventional location for later. The cabin trip was supposed to be something looser.

“It was just we're going to hang out in the woods and swim, and we're going to cook for each other and we're going to bring a bunch of microphones and we'll see what happens.”

What happened was Natural Light. On the first night, Mangan played his friends a song called “It Might Be Raining.”

“They were really into it and they said let's just have a rip. Let's just play it and see what happens,” he said.

A couple of takes later, they had the song. The following day, his bandmates wanted more.

Six days later, they had recorded 13 songs.

“It was a very special memory, I would say, in my life,” he said.

There is a particular intimacy to Natural Light, and Mangan believes much of that came from the absence of pressure. In a conventional studio, the clock is running. Every minute costs money. There is a temptation to chase the perfect take, the perfect sound, the perfect recording. At the cabin, none of that mattered.

“I felt zero fear,” Mangan said. “I was just absolutely locked in. I felt just joy.”

The record was recorded with digital equipment, but the process felt decidedly old-school. The musicians were often in the same room. Sometimes they weren't even wearing headphones.

“There’s a lot of bleed on this record between the instruments,” he said.

That bleed, Mangan noted, is part of what gives some of the great old recordings their life.

“It was freeing to just sort of be in a room with humans playing music and not worry about a click track or a grid or whether something was going to be suitable for the radio or not.”

For once, the audience wasn't the first consideration.

“It was only like we were only catering to our tastes,” he said, “and with zero regard for the final product and what the world might like or not like it or do with it.”

That philosophy seems to extend beyond Natural Light. At age 43, Mangan says he has reached a point where he is less concerned about keeping score. His own measurement of success has become much simpler: Is he making something meaningful?

“My own keeping score of how effectively I am, you know, creating things that I think are meaningful matters more to me, and the external - people listening to it - matters less to me.”

That doesn't mean he has stopped caring about his audience. Quite the opposite. Mangan remains genuinely amazed that people anywhere can know his songs well enough to sing them back to him.

“I can go anywhere outside of my hometown and have people singing lyrics back at me,” he said. “It never gets old.”

Whether there are 50 people in the room or 5,000, he said, he doesn't take that connection for granted.

“The fact that I can pay a mortgage playing music is a miracle.”

That perspective may also explain why Mangan is comfortable taking his music into smaller Canadian communities. He has toured extensively across the country, including some of its more remote corners, and he says he takes pride in understanding the place he calls home.

“I've always felt like a very Canadian artist,” he said. “I've had the privilege of getting to a lot of the extremities.”

Now, rather than simply sticking to the major Canadian markets, he's deliberately looking beyond them.

“It's nice to sort of go beyond the major cities,” he said.

And perhaps that's where the Saskatchewan run gets particularly interesting. Mangan knows that not everyone in Swift Current, Prince Albert or elsewhere will necessarily arrive knowing every word. But he doesn't see that as a problem.

“I have yet to go anywhere in the world where, like, everyone sucks,” he said with a laugh.

For him, travelling to different communities is part of the point.

“I think it's really good to be face-to-face with different humans who live different lives and to understand the struggles that people have in different parts of the country or different parts of the world.”

It is a remarkably fitting philosophy for a record born out of four people simply getting into a room together and making music without worrying about what anybody else thought.

And Mangan seems genuinely comfortable with where that has left him.

“I’m really, really proud of my songs, my body of work,” he said. “And I’m really, really thankful for the life that I have.”

He is also convinced that the songwriting itself is getting better.

“The songs I'm writing today are the best songs I've ever written,” he said.

That's a bold thing for an artist with more than two decades of work behind him to say.

But Mangan isn't saying it simply out of enthusiasm. He says it with the perspective of having written a lot of songs and lived through the various stages of a career.

“Maybe there's gonna come a point where it starts going downhill,” he said, “but I'm very, very thankful.”

Mostly, though, he seems content to let the songs find their own audience. He invokes Nick Drake as an example of an artist whose work eventually became far more significant than the commercial success he experienced while alive.

“The songs of the day were there,” Mangan said. “They were always there. They were always there even when people didn't care. The zeitgeist comes and goes, and what is popular comes and goes.”

And that's perhaps the simplest way to understand where Dan Mangan is right now.

He isn't chasing the zeitgeist. He's making songs. And then he's taking those songs on the road... This time taking the scenic route through Saskatchewan.

“I just sort of feel like the songs will find the people that they're meant to find,” he said.

“And maybe that's not very many people. Maybe it's just a small amount of people. I don't know. But whoever they're meant to find, I kind of have faith that those are people who are meant to find them.”

For four Saskatchewan audiences, the opportunity to find them is coming soon.

Dan Mangan's Natural Light Tour will be in Saskatchewan on the following dates:

Oct. 1 — Prince Albert — E.A. Rawlinson Centre for the Arts

Oct. 2 — Saskatoon — Broadway Theatre

Oct. 3 — Swift Current — Living Sky Casino

Oct. 4 — Regina — Darke Hall