STUART DERDEYN Back to basics
Mangan showcases strength as simple storyteller on fifth album
Dan Mangan’s fifth album titled More Or Less, showcases the singer’s return to straight-ahead songwriting after 2015’s experimental Club Meds.
That critically acclaimed album and subsequent tour with Blacksmith was an experience he says he’ll never forget. But rather than employ the who’s who of Canada’s top improvising musicians once again, Mangan, 35, wanted to strip it back to basics and sing. Along the way, he found new ways to use his gravelly, emotional voice by singing more softly. It gave his voice a great deal more range and colour.
“Touring with Blacksmith was this huge sound and it often seemed like I was riding along on this wave,” he said. “After a gig, I’d be at the merch table meeting people who would make it clear to me that they liked it but really wanted to have more of my voice up front in structured songs, more like my older material. I would say that the quality of response I’ve had on the four songs that we’ve trickled out on this record to date has really reinforced that was the right direction to go.”
The four songs in question were Fool For Waiting, Troubled Mind, Cold in the Summer and Just Fear. Immaculate production courtesy of Grammy award-winning producer Drew Brown (Radiohead, Beck and others) and Simone Felice (the Lumineers, Bat for Lashes) positions Mangan’s voice in ways it’s never been captured before, bringing out new range and power. In the process of making the album, he says he discovered what he’s good at.
“I had to try a whole bunch of stuff because it was where my heart was at, but if you distil down what I’m good at, it’s communicating meaning through a lyric,” he said. “I’m not an incredible musician and I’ll never be one because I’ve spent enough time around them to know they possess something I’ll never have. But I do what I do, and that’s write good songs and find a way to use my voice — which you wouldn’t want in your choir — to deliver them.”
More Or Less is a fine-tuned album that bears a definite stamp of the producers. Mangan says he was stunned when Brown got back to him and brought in session aces such as drummer Joey Waronker (Roger Waters, Beck, R.E.M.), instrumentalist Jason Falkner and engineer Darrell Thorp at the studio in Los Angeles. He had never previously worked in this way.
“It had to be the fifth record where I handed the keys over to someone else. I could never have done this on my third album,” Mangan said. “But Drew really drove the bus, and that’s pretty cool that he believed enough in the songs to put in all that time. He took songs away to work on, adding and subtracting and not letting me hear them between sessions, and it became a real collaboration.”
More often than not, it was what Brown took out that Mangan had to come to terms with. Of all the things listeners hear on More Or Less, clutter isn’t one of them. The opening tune, Lynchpin, is vocals, bass, minimalist drums and barely anything else. Lay Low is even more bare, with the voice hitting high ranges rarely heard and so up in the mix, you can almost feel his breath blowing across your ear.
“There were so many moments where we would have a great bed track and I would be, ‘I can’t wait to add 50 million things to this,’ and Drew would be telling me to wait, listen back in a while and likely discover it was 90 per cent done,” Mangan said. “We would be doing run-throughs of a song and he would figure out what it needed or didn’t need during that process, and then off he went to make it final. I was in command for a long time, so it was a very hard thing to learn to trust.”
But eliminating what he thought the sound would be eventually freed him to hone in his performance.
The writing on More Or Less is coming from a very different man than those earlier albums did. Mangan admits that the album “feels more like me than ever. More sparse. Less meticulous. More kids. Less time. More direct. Less metaphor. More discovery. Less youth. More warmth. Less chaos.”
If one song perfectly captures the place that the married father facing raising a family in tumultuous times is in now, it’s the self-deprecating ditty Cold in the Summer. Speculating that being someone losing touch with youth culture and not wanting to be “the kinda guy that gets a cold in the summer,” the tune is openly honest about aging up into the “adult artist.”
It’s where Mangan and his audience are all headed, and the twotime Juno Award winner has really tapped into it with new material.
“The record feels different, more accessible and also slightly weirder than anything I’ve done,” he said. “It’s certainly some of my best songwriting and I’m OK with it being more widely accessible.”
Not only does he talk the talk, but Mangan is actively involved in building support for art in the community. He co-founded Side Door, which matches artists with hosts to present unique performances in the privacy of one’s own home or other private space.
At one time, Mangan might have been willing to cash in that community spirit for the individual domains of massive superstardom. He shakes his head at the notion now.
During the recording of More Or Less, he met someone from that rarefied world, one Sir Paul McCartney. “We did one pass of Lay Low in the studio and then Paul McCartney pops his head in, which I guess that’s just what he does because he’s Paul McCartney,” Mangan said.