bcscene.ca

It’s challenging to listen to Dan Mangan’s song “Robots” without singing along with the refrain: “Robots need love, too / They want to be loved by you.” Those words may or may not be true, but you believe them when you hear them.

Perhaps Mangan, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter from Vancouver, isn’t really singing about robots. But your interpretation, he says, is as good as his.      

“I think the truth is that once you’ve written something and you kind of put it out there into the world, it’s going to take on different forms to you,” Mangan says. “I like the idea that songs are ever-changing and are never actually finished.”  

Having just returned to Ottawa from a three-week European tour with his band—including guitarist Gordon Grdina, drummer Kenton Loewen, and bassist John Walsh—Mangan will begin a month-long tour of Canada, entitled “Peculiar Travel Suggestions,” on October 25.  

“We’ve done a lot of touring in bars,” Mangan says. “This tour does have some bars on it, but we’re also doing some churches and halls, some places that are a little bit less chaotic.”

Not that he was casting any judgment on chaos.

 “I really enjoy playing bars,” he says. “You’re helping to kind of create a party.”  

But with the success of his most recent album, Nice, Nice, Very Nice, which was nominated for the 2010 Polaris Music Prize, Mangan has more freedom to write his own ticket.

“There are aspects of playing shows in more kind of civilized places that you feel like you can come across with a real concert from start to finish,” Mangan says. “It can be a more cerebral experience. For the time being I’m excited to take it into more intimate venues.”

Having spent about two months on tour with his band, Mangan is happy to feel less like a solo artist, which is how he first started touring, and more like a member of a tight, cohesive group.  

“I feel less and less like I’m writing songs and then having people play along,” he said, “and more and more like I’ve got a bunch of songs that are mostly written and then bringing them to the guys and saying, ‘What do you guys want to do with this?'”

Mangan feels he can rely on them to do something he would not have foreseen: Grdina and Loewen are jazz musicians, while Mangan’s music is more indie folk.  

 “It’s nice because they bring out all kinds of flavours that other musicians might not, and I get to drag things out of them that they might not normally do as well,” he says.

He and his band have been working out about three or four new songs while on tour and will use the upcoming shows to hone them on stage. Mangan plans on cutting a new record with the new material in December when he returns to Vancouver. Still, he doesn’t regard his other songs as essentially complete.  

“[It’s not good] if you can’t find anything relatable in the song each time,” he says. “I think that’s the most important thing—to just try and live a song every time that you play it.”

Dan Mangan plays La Sala Rossa, October 25. Tickets are $18.