“I don’t want to say I don’t give a shit anymore, but I give less shit.”
This is Juno-winning Canadian singer/songwriter Dan Mangan, who, when we chat, is about to launch a Canada-wide tour in support of his latest album, More or Less. Although I am the sixth of seven back-to-back interviews for him, I am graced with friendly laughter, gentle warmth, and vulnerable honesty from the 35-year-old Vancouverite.
“I’ve always felt sort of on the outside of what was cool, and somewhere along the way I started to feel more and more okay with that,” says Mangan about what it means to return to touring after taking time off to welcome his two children into the world.
It’s been six years since Mangan’s days of performing 100 to 250 shows in a year. In fact, it’s been four years since his last album tour and, for Mangan, this feels “like a little bit of a comeback.”
“I’ve sort of recoiled and been out of the public space and I’m ready to take the wheel again and get in front of people,” says Mangan. “I mean, there’s nothing really as special as feeling totally, kind of cosmically connected to a big room full of people. It sort of recalibrates the metaphysical making up of your soul and body and it can re-energize you. You feel understood and you feel that you understand other people and that’s really what creates joy, and what creates contentment and happiness is just, you know, to feel understood and to feel heard.”
Contrary to expectation, Mangan isn’t hoping for flawless sets; in fact, he describes his favourite moments of the show as those accidental incidents when something goes a little bit wrong.
“Hopefully, at some point in the set, there’s this sort of, like, great exhalation and then it’s just people, and when we’re all just people, then that opens up the door for this super-duper magical thing, which is where you supersede the presumption of the event and get into just living inside of it,” he says. “It’s when you fail that you learn the most.”
Fatherhood and the domestic experience away from the spotlight seem to have stretched and tested Mangan’s learning in many ways.
“The stakes are higher on life,” he says. “All of the things that we do to protect ourselves, all these sort of veils and walls that we put up around us to try to keep ourselves from being too vulnerable to the world, kids just rip all of that away. They kind of just tear you open from the inside.”
It was in that new vulnerability that Mangan created More or Less. He describes it in relation to his previous album, Club Meds, as “more personal, more earnest, more tender-hearted, and, ultimately, more accessible.”
“I think there’s a lot of people kind of my age,” he says, “who are feeling the same thing I’m feeling in terms of, like, ‘How do you raise kids in the Trump era?’ You know? Where do we instil our hope for the future, for our kids?”
For Mangan, the answer is simple.
“I want warmth, I want tenderness, I want kindness,” he says. “That’s the shit that makes me feel good, so that’s what I want to put out in the world and, you know, whether it’s cool or not—well, I wasn’t all that cool before, so, you know, what do I have to lose?”
Dan Mangan
7 pm Thursday, February 14
$34.50, Alix Goolden Hall (sold out)
vcm.bc.ca/alix-goolden-hall