Scott Roos
Special to the Herald
For Dan Mangan, the upcoming Saskatchewan tour is about more than adding another handful of dates to an already busy touring schedule. It’s about getting out there. Mangan will make his Prince Albert debut in the coming weeks as part of a four-show Saskatchewan run that also includes stops in Swift Current, Saskatoon and Regina. It’s a stretch of the province that the Vancouver-based singer-songwriter says was partly intentional.
“I said to my agent that I was interested in going a little bit deeper in general in a lot of parts of Canada,” Mangan explained during a recent interview with the Herald. “We did some bigger shows with the band last fall … so this was a chance to sort of get out to some of the smaller towns.”
Mangan has spent much of his career travelling the country and beyond, but he says there is something particularly valuable about seeing the places between Canada’s major centres.
“I’ve always felt like a very Canadian artist,” he said. “I’ve had the privilege of getting to a lot of the extremities.”
That includes everything from Newfoundland and Labrador to Dawson City to areas north of 60 like Yellowknife and Iqaluit, and Mangan sees the opportunity to play smaller Canadian communities as part of understanding the country itself.
“There are people everywhere who are great,” he said. “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.”
Mangan’s Saskatchewan shows come in support of Natural Light, an album that was created in circumstances almost completely removed from the traditional studio environment. Mangan and three friends headed to a cabin by a lake for six days. The original plan wasn’t even to make an album. They figured they would write, record some demos, swim, cook and see what happened. Instead, the group emerged six days later with 13 songs.
“It kind of felt like we blacked out and six days later 13 songs had been recorded,” Mangan said. “It was a very special memory, I would say, in my life.”
The relaxed environment was crucial. Unlike a conventional studio session, there was no clock ticking, no record label waiting for a finished product and no pressure to produce something commercially viable.
“It was only like we were only catering to our tastes,” Mangan said. “With zero regard for the final product and what the world might like it or not like it.”
That freedom also shaped the sound of Natural Light. The musicians played together in the same room, sometimes without headphones, allowing the instruments to bleed into one another.
Mangan said that imperfections became part of the record’s character.
“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,” he said.
That philosophy seems to extend beyond Natural Light and into where Mangan finds himself in his career. At 43, after years of awards, touring and the inevitable ups and downs of the music business, Mangan said he feels more comfortable with his artistic identity than ever.
“My career has never been more solid on like a real foundation than it is right now,” he said.
More importantly, he believes the songwriting itself is getting better.
“I feel like I’m doing the real work now and that the songs I’m writing today are the best songs I’ve ever written,” he said.
And perhaps that is what makes the upcoming Prince Albert show particularly interesting. Mangan isn’t arriving simply to revisit the songs that established him. He’s arriving as an artist who says he is still discovering what he can do.
“I kind of just care less,” he said. “My own keeping score of how effectively I am creating things that I think are meaningful matters more to me.”
For Mangan, the songs will ultimately find the people they are supposed to find.
“I kind of have faith that those are people who are meant to find them,” he said.
Prince Albert will get its opportunity on Thursday, October 1st at the EA Rawlinsons Centre for the Arts.
