Beloved B.C. musician Dan Mangan on his new album, Natural Light
'I've never experienced anything even close to that, ever,' Mangan says of unexpected album recording session
Vancouver's Dan Mangan has always had a knack for providing comfort on a rainy day, a moment of reprieve during heavy times. His 2018 track, Troubled Mind, captured both the woe and the absurdity of the world as we know it, and 2022's In Your Corner (for Scott Hutchison) mended hearts broken by the loss of a Scottish music legend.
His latest album, Natural Light, released Friday, builds on his polished folk sound and honest, sometimes validating lyrics through songs like Cut the Brakes, Diminishing Returns and Soapbox.
He's been playing the latter of the three at live shows for a couple of years. It's become a hugely important song for Mangan.
"It's about the, sort of, what is it about us that we repeat our worst histories over and over and over and over again? And how can we learn from those things? Why do we fall into fear? Why do we fall into hatred? Why can't we just be good to each other?" he said.
"Everybody wins, you win, you feel good when you're kind and other people win … and yet the scarcity mentality is sort of, I don't know if it's driven into us in a Darwinian sense, into our evolution, we feel like we must protect ourselves so deeply.
"It just sort of seems to be becoming more and more and more relevant as the months go by."
Mangan sat down for an interview with CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where does the title Natural Light come from?
This album did have a different title for a little while — it was called Contained Free, which was sort of like a mantra coming into the record. I wanted to feel contained. I wanted it to feel like it was this thing that happened all in one place, but I wanted it to feel creatively uncontained. So we thought it would be, and we delivered it to [the label] Arts and Crafts. They were like, 'we really like this record, but we feel like the title is a bit academic, or heady or cerebral or something, could you think of a title that was a little bit more in line with how the record feels?'
I was really frustrated. Once you've closed the door on a decision, you think that you don't have to deal with that anymore. And so I went upstairs and had a shower, and I turned off the light in the bathroom, and I cracked the blinds. I prefer to bathe in natural light. And it just occurred to me that this record feels sort of like when light is coming through a window, the sunlight is coming through, and you see all the dust particles. I feel like this record feels like those little dust particles.
It Might Be Raining is the first track on the album. What's the inspiration behind that song?
My kids are 12 and eight, and I feel as they approach their adolescence that I'm thinking about their world and thinking about the world as it was when I was their age in the 90s, and what a different world it is, and in some ways what a totally similar world it is. I realize that there are going to be hardships in their life from which I cannot spare them, and I don't know what those hardships necessarily are.
They're going to go into the world and they're going to discover things that speak to them. When I was a teenager, I found music, I found art, I found films that had nothing to do with my parents. That felt good. It felt like I was seeing myself articulated back. And so it kind of breaks my heart that they're going to go out in the world and they're going to discover things that speak to them that have nothing to do with me personally. And that's beautiful, and that's what I want for them. But it's hard.
You recorded your album unexpectedly over six days with four friends by a lake. Who are those friends, and how did you come to be by that lake unexpectedly?
Since 2018, I've had a band which is Don Kerr on drums, Jason Haberman on bass, and Mike O'Brien on guitar. We have played hundreds of shows together. We've never been in the studio together. And since then, I've made several records, but they were with American producers, American musicians.
Jason had this place that he had just gotten in the fall. He was really excited about it, and he was going to go and open it up for the summer, and we figured, let's just go. We can cook for each other, we can swim, we can bring microphones, we can bring some gear and have zero expectation of what we were going to accomplish. I had dates set in Los Angeles later to record an album.
And then when we got in there and we set up some microphones, we thought we would demo, we thought we would do some writing, etc. But I'd just written the song It Might Be Raining and I played it for the guys and they were like, "let's just have a rip." And we did like three takes, and it was done. It was like, bam, that's the song.
The next morning, they were like, well, do you have more songs or what do you want to do? And I was like, I have like 12 other songs up my sleeve. A lot of these songs have been living in me for five, six years. It was this miracle snowball effect. It Might Be Raining kind of started it. It was the catalyst. The second day, we recorded two songs. The third day, three songs. The fourth day, we recorded four songs. It got faster and more exciting, more creatively vibrant and explosive every day. I've never experienced anything even close to that, ever.
What role do you as an artist play in these difficult times?
I'm never short of opinions online, and I tend to post about political things, and anytime I get a message like that kind of shut up and sing, stick in your lane cliché, I'm sort of like, this is my lane. This has always been my lane.
I don't think every artist needs to be political, but I think that if you look at, over the course of time, what is the truly great art and what art lasts, it's often political to some extent. It's hard for art to not be political.
Good art should reflect some part of inner truth. You send that out in the world, and someone else sees that smoke signal and they feel their own existence articulated back to them. And that feels warm and fuzzy because it tells them that they're not alone. Art is the great connector. It's the glue that bleeds into the cracks between us and helps connect us and keep us together.
I do love the video for Diminishing Returns. Tell me about that day.
We recorded it on the very first sunny day, a beautiful Sunday that we had on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. The video is very simple. I put a GoPro on the edge of my guitar and I wander down the street playing this song. This song is a funny one because it's talking about climate change. In a sense, it's a climate denial anthem in that it's sort of saying all this stuff is really real and we might be in it for it, but also, you know, having sex in the afternoon is pretty awesome, too. We see the news reports, and we understand that all of these existential threats are upon us.
And yet, we renew our mortgages, we go to the dry cleaner, we buy the two-year subscription because it's cheaper. Meanwhile, at night, we're doom scrolling and we're freaking out about what's next. I think that there is, in me, a little bit of a Buddhist, that it's like, OK, but what can I focus on right now? How can I bring joy? I can't necessarily control climate change, but something I can do is just enjoy the beauty that's right in front of me.
This song might have one of my favourite lyrics on the record, which is: I don't presume to know what is in store or just how many wolves are at the door, but I've seen your body bending with the morning light ascending. And I will die defending our diminishing returns.
With files from Courtney Dickson and North by Northwest