Dan Mangan is in Your Corner
By Ellie Zygmunt“I will pine for the oak streets/And pine for the cedars and you”
Some artists try to take you higher and some try to take you to the club, but Dan Mangan tries to bring his audience home.
“We brought the fireplace from Ontario,” says Dan, gesturing at a stage outfitted with Edison lightbulbs and afghan blankets, a brace of guitars and a cozy tangle of microphone cables and amps. If it were possible to fit all 1,280 of us at Vancouver’s Vogue Theatre into the Ontario cabin where he recorded Natural Light, Dan would do it. Since that’s impossible, Dan brought the cabin to us. Not content to stop at furnishings, Dan parts a curtain on a video backdrop of a lakeside sunset. “This was our view while we recorded the album,” he explains, “We brought that too!”
Dan and the gang are here to play Natural Light from top to bottom. We’ve just reached the album’s B-side when a yell rises from stage left: someone’s passed out in the high heat of the standing section. “I did the exact same thing at a Ben Harper show in 1999,” says Dan, smoothing the crowd over before taking “Soapbox” from the top. He doesn’t make it past the first chorus before there’s more yelling, this time from stage right: the heat has taken out another audience member. “Is this song cursed? This is turning into 28 Songs Later!” The latest fainting victim is helped out by security, someone finally props the doors open to let in a breeze, and the show rolls on.
Judging by the enthusiastic singalong to “Basket,” a track from 2009’s Nice, Nice, Very Nice, this is a crowd of old hands. I count myself among them. There was a time when we shotgunned beers before dancing to “Robots”. Now we wear sensible shoes and stretch our backs between songs, trying to stay limber and hydrated. It’s getting late, but Dan’s nowhere near done: after playing an entire album, he starts an entire second set of classics. Dan’s a generous host, and this is an adoring crowd. We’re going to sing our stupid heads off to the ones who are not listening.
”I’m getting used to coffee sweats/still getting used to road regrets”
My first Dan Mangan concert was in 2009. My roommate bought me a ticket to his show at the now defunct Marquee Room in Calgary. The Marquee Room was haunted before it closed down and the ghosts were restless that night. While we sipped dangerously cheap vodka cranberries, my roommate and I watched another patron try to open one of the sticky windows to let in some air. The window popped out of its frame and fell two storeys onto Stephen Avenue, smashed to dust.
I learned two things from this event:
- A window crashing onto pavement from two storeys up is very loud.
- The sound of glass falling from a great height will instantly sober up a crowd.
Strangeness concentrates the mind, and I remember that show with unusual vividness. The Marquee Room stage was barely big enough to fit a drum kit and a singer. It was a scant six inches higher than the dance floor and trimmed with metallic streamers normally used to skirt the bottom of parade floats. The lighting was one rack of stage lights and a disco ball with a flashlight pointed at it. It was precisely the kind of room an up and coming indie folk guy from Vancouver would show up to with a guitar and CDs sold out of a milk crate.
Dan killed it that night. The crowd was singing the chorus to “Robots” after one rendition, foreshadowing the set-closing anthem it would become. The opening bars of “Road Regrets” and the lyrics to “The Indie Queens are Waiting” wormed into my brain and never left. I bought his CDs on my way out, just before the milk crate ran out. “That was weird, but also great,” I told my roommate, “I’d see him again.”
Little did I know that not only would I go to more Dan Mangan shows, each one would be uniquely beautiful and strange. A surprise snowstorm closed in over the November 2010 show in Canmore. My then boyfriend (now husband!), Lars, and I drove home to Calgary in the snow at 15km/hr. We listened to Postcards and Daydreaming to keep our nerves steady in the storm. Three years later, the power went out in the Gower Street Church in St. John’s. Dan closed out the night by playing a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” standing next to me on a pew in the middle of the blackout, lit by hundreds of cell phone flashlights.
Then there was the Calgary Ghost Show of 2020. Intended to be the 10th anniversary tour stop for Nice, Nice, Very Nice, the concert was cancelled by Covid. I have a beautiful commemorative poster for a show that never happened. When Dan returned to Calgary in 2023, there was a couple seated in the front row dressed in wedding clothes. Rather than stage a fancy ceremony, they got hitched by the commissioner and came to the show. Dan invited the couple up onstage for their first dance, playing “Fool for Waiting” as a toast.
I’d like to tell any new fans in the crowd at the Vogue that every Dan Mangan show is like this. Generous, joyful, raucous, and weird. Two people passing out in the course of a single song isn’t even the strangest thing I’ve witnessed in 16 years of Mangan Gigs. It wouldn’t be a Dan Mangan show if the universe didn’t interrupt to remind you that it’s still there by tapping on the glass.
”You’ve got a right to be sad/It’s part of the deal”
“This isn’t Mick Jagger stuff,” Dan jokes from the Vogue stage. He’s holding up a banner with a QR code and reciting a phone number for everyone to add to their phone contacts. Staying alive as independent musician, even after winning a pair of Juno awards and gigs scoring Netflix and CBC series, requires persistence and ingenuity. If you add Dan’s phone number (310-347-4597) he’ll text you: show updates, tour info, links to live recordings, and the odd angel emoji. Fans can text song requests. It’s a direct access lifeline that can’t be cut by the whims of a streaming platform or record company.
Dan is candid about the challenges of making music in an era where the means to get paid for it are exceptionally strained. “It’s upsetting that my music is helping to bankroll war machine profiteers, and that the streaming experience has become one big mood playlist… audio wallpaper,” he wrote this spring as news broke of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in AI military tech. Record labels were never exactly famous for generosity, but in an era of fractions of a penny paid per stream and touring costs rivalling the budget lines of small nations, Dan has taken the position now is no time to lie low. He co-founded Side Door, a platform that directly connects artists and venues to circumvent ticketing monopolies. It gives artists a wider range of venues to play, from coffee shops to backyards. There’s the aforementioned texting club, along with a podcast and a newsletter to stay connected with fans. Dan’s going to make sure you hear his music, algorithm be damned.
”Leave a light on when it’s bad/And we will congregate and make a plan/We’ll be in your corner”
Walking into the Vogue I hoped to hear a lot of old favourites in the set, but the song stuck in my head that Friday night is a newer one: “In Your Corner (For Scott Hutchison)”.
If you were an indie music fan in the mid-augts and early 2010s, Frightened Rabbit was almost certainly in your Top 25 playlist. “In Your Corner” is dedicated to the memory Hutchison, Frightened Rabbit’s frontman, who died by suicide 2018. “It’s for him, but it’s for anyone else, all of us, when life feels hard,” is how Dan introduced the song during a 2023 show. There have been a lot of hard moments over the years, to the point where I struggled to find any moments of ease. I’ve been lucky to find shelter from those storms in family, friendship, and music, safe harbours with the light on to pull me back in. I have a hard time listening to “In Your Corner” without choking up, but I’d miss it if it didn’t appear in the set. It’s a beauty live. I’m happy it made the cut this time.
”Go on pack me up, I’m sold”
It’s impossible to listen to Dan Mangan and not think of the blizzards and the broken glass. His music has provided the soundtrack for moments great and small for more than 15 years. Putting on one of his albums is like walking into a warm living room on a winter’s day after you’ve shovelled the driveway. It is gracious and spacious, filled with the wry experience of a road warrior and the ruddy enthusiasm of a guitar obsessive. It captures the enormity of a country that takes nine days to drive across and the terror of trying to make it home through a snowstorm in the dark. It’s what you want to dance to on your wedding day. It’s the music I turn to when I don’t know what to do. It’s the music I turn to when I want everything and nothing. It’s the music I turn to when I want to feel like someone’s in my corner even if I’m not.
Encore
If you want to experience the Dan Mangan magic for yourself he’s on tour right now and hopefully playing near you. If you can’t make it to a show, you can find his music at Arts & Crafts and on your morally dubious but technically useful streaming platform of choice. If it was up to me, I think you should start with my super awesome Dan Mangan is in Your Corner Playlist, which would be my ideal concert set. Just putting that out into the universe.