Week of October 29, 2009, Issue #732
COVER
Dan Mangan
A Nice, Nice, Very Nice year: A bit of bad karma can't stop Dan Mangan from relishing 2009's good fortune
David Berry / david@vueweekly.com
Dan Mangan's voice normally has its fair share of ragged, but picking up the phone from a hotel room in the Maritimes, he sounds as though he's been gargling with gravel.
"Yeah, I'm kind of rough. I might have swine flu," the Vancouver singer-songwriter explains, offering a bit of a chuckle that ends in a full-blown hack, almost on cue. As he tells it, H1N1 would qualify as an appropriate cap for the last few weeks of a tour that's been, logistically at least, a slight nightmare. "We've had some seriously chaotic tribulations: we've had to backtrack and people have left luggage behind in Fargo, North Dakota. There was a good stretch of about two weeks where it felt like we couldn't catch a break.
"Obviously, all in all, it's been good, though," Mangan adds, also helpfully pointing out that his bout of sickness is probably one of the lesser flu varietals. "And in essence, I was probably due for some poor karma."
That might be only partly right. It's hard to imagine someone as affable and sincerely down to earth as Mangan comes across doing much to piss off the gods. At the same time, if they were looking for someone to take down a peg or two, in the name of restoring balance, Mangan might well be at the top of their list. Though his second full-length album, Nice, Nice, Very Nice, has only been out a scant three months, he's been having the kind of year musicians dream of. On the strength of Very Nice, the year's earlier Roboteering EP and his seemingly tireless work ethic, which took him as far away as Australia and Europe, Vancouver's Georgia Straight crowned him the indie king of the city in an August cover story. And what might have only been a nod to one of the stand-out tracks on both the EP and the album—"The Indie Queens Are Waiting," a sweetly sardonic tour of Vancouver's hipper scenes with BC musical matron Veda Hille—quickly proved prophetic when Mangan took home the XM Verge Artist of the Year award, a listener-chosen prize that carries with it a $25,000 cash prize, besides the prestige.
The fact it's fan-voted seems particularly appropriate for Mangan. Though Nice, Nice, Very Nice has had no shortage of critical praise, Mangan has earned his greater attention the honest way, jaunting across the country in support of his previous effort, Postcards and Daydreaming, so often over the course of the four-year gap between albums that road-weariness and a longing for home are among his most prevalent themes in the new batch of songs. The payoff, though, has been undeniable: besides the XM award, he's also had the utterly rare privilege of getting commercial radio play, something independent artists across the country will tell you is probably more rare than big cash prizes.
"[Commercial radio support] is kind of mind-blowing," Mangan states simply. "Never in a very long time did I ever expect that kind of thing to happen. All of the sudden, hundreds more people are coming to my gigs in Vancouver, and it's like, 'Oh, all this exposure: it works.'"
"The one thing I've really noticed, too, is that it brings in a younger audience," he adds, somewhat characteristically turning the conversation away from him and towards another topic, as though he's still not quite comfortable with the idea that people might find just him interesting enough to warrant mention. "I played an in-store at Zulu Records in Vancouver before we left on the trip, and the place was packed with, like, 12- to 16-year-old girls. That's just not the audience I'm used to being exposed to."
Mangan, for his charm, doesn't seem to be in much danger of becoming a pop idol, at least not unless 12-year-olds' taste for wry documentation of life's travails sees some kind of spike. And yet neither should he be lumped in with the kind of stalwart troubadour who gets by chiefly on affability and a relentless work ethic. Where Postcards and Daydreaming was a pleasant if not entirely unique singer-songwriter album, the kind that fills the coffee shop demand until another bright young singer with a guitar comes along, Nice, Nice, Very Nice is something else entirely, a tuneful and clever kind of diary of a man who has obviously spent the last four years watching and listening to what's around him.
That's evident even from the first notes of the album: "Road Regrets" opens with a distant chime, peaking up lightly like the first hints of sunrise before bursting into a slightly more familiar, but still rolling highway rock tune. It's followed immediately by "Robots," an almost shamefully catchy country-influenced pop song, the shuffling two-step and banjo suggesting a lot more emotion than the song's narrator is evidently capable of. Even his simpler, more stripped-down numbers show a willingness to shoehorn in some expansive pop: the string plucks of the sad-sack "You Silly Git," the vocal harmonies, subtle accordion and plinking xylophone on "The Indie Queens Are Waiting," the subtle horns and shimmering, affected guitar lines of the mournful, homesick "Pine For Cedars," certainly the album's highlight for sad bastards.
"I found after that first record—which was a really kind of singer-songwriter-y record, really stripped down and just a guy with a guitar—the kinds of gigs I was getting and the kinds of things that were coming to me were very much in line with that. But at the same time, I didn't want to box myself into that. I think that Chad VanGaalen or Elliott Brood or Grizzly Bear could play any folk fest in Canada, but at the same time, they could also play Virgin Fest," Mangan explains of his more expansive sounds, noting that he's particularly excited about the blending of seemingly disparate genres. "I'm really invested in the CBC3, Exclaim sort of indie-pop-rock scene, and tapping into that kind of vibe or culture is important to me, because I love so much of it. At the same time ... I've been exposed to those really traditional folk bands, too, and I like the sound of a mandolin. I'd like to be able to straddle both worlds, and I really don't want to get pigeonholed in one or the other."
Though this genre-embracing has allowed him to expand his aural repertoire, the thing that really comes across on Nice, Nice, Very Nice is his increasing aptitude as an observationalist. Mangan is developing a rare talent that is both incisive and sympathetic—he's able to pick up on the most telling of details, and can use them equally as well whether he's trying to puncture ridiculousness or embrace melancholy. "You Silly Git," for instance, is part love song and part self-flagellation, one that manages to sum up in three minutes the experience of both missing someone painfully and the ridiculousness of anyone overlooking our own various faults enough to fall in love with each other, and it's very much indicative of the layers Mangan infuses throughout.
"I think a lot of my writing surrounds the idea of how absurd everything is, and how silly we are, and I think that it's not coming from a pedestal, that I'm somehow less of a culprit than everyone else: I very much feel like I'm absolutely in the middle of it," offers Mangan in an attempt to explain the worldview that leads to this sort of thing. "I think that I see paradoxes and all kinds of hypocrisies in myself all the time, so a lot of what I write about has to do with being out in the world and seeing that around. I think increasingly so I've been kind of drifting towards observational lyricism. I guess it's the Jerry Seinfeld effect: 'what's the deal with ... .'"
But one of Mangan's real strengths is his ability to not only be funny, but shockingly sincere at the same time; he's the type of artist who's just as comfortable making fun of the absurdity he points out as he is at embracing the power and, frankly, beauty of dropping that cynic's guard and experiencing the world wholeheartedly. It's very similar in spirit to the man who obliquely gave the album its name: Nice, Nice, Very Nice is a reference to the poems of Bokononism, the absurdity-embracing religion of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. While Mangan will deny that he's in any way comparable to the American legend, he's not at all surprised to see the influence extending beyond titling.
"Well, you know sometimes when you read something, and you've felt the same way forever, but you could never have articulated it in such a clever way? It's that thing where you agree with someone wholeheartedly, but you could never have expressed it so eloquently. And that's kind of how I feel a lot of the time when I read Kurt Vonnegut: in two lines, he can sum up all of humanity," says Mangan, who's certainly heading down a similar path himself. "Sometimes I think the people who can be the most cutting can also have the warmest hearts underneath. I think it's important to embrace both sides, though: if you're kind of naïve to the harshness of the world, you're not setting yourself up for any kind of perspective. At the same time, if you only focus on the harshness or horrible things, you're never allowing yourself any release from it." V
Fri, Oct 30 (7:30 pm)
Dan Mangan
with manraygun, James Lamb
Haven Social Club, $15
Photos by: Jonathan Taggart http://www.jonathantaggart.com
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