Dan Mangan, Canada’s gentle-voiced indie-folk superstar, had a conundrum. He had a stash of songs, songs he really loved. It was a hodgepodge of work, though, with no cohesive theme. Nothing like a tidy studio album but much too interesting to idle silently on his hard drive forever. What to do?
Introducing Being Elsewhere, Mangan’s ‘mix CD’ album, which drops August 30, following his late 2022 release of Being Somewhere.
“This is not a record, in the way a studio record normally is,” Mangan says. “This is covers and re-imaginings of songs from the last record and a handful of singles that have come out since then. It’s sort of a collection.”
The album nods to the pre-streaming days of carefully downloading songs and burning CDs for your friends.
“I like that this collection of music is slightly all over the place, in the same way that you would put on your friend’s mix CD and it would bounce around, from vibe to vibe,” he says.
After the pandemic, Mangan says, he was contemplating his hard drive, full of songs from various projects.
“I have an entirely new album almost finished but I just felt like I couldn’t really move on to the next chapter without giving credence to this era,” he says. “I feel like this music deserves to be heard. I want to put a stamp on it: ‘Okay, did that. Here it is, world,’ and then I can move on to the next era.”
New album, you say? What can you tell us about that? “That it is the coolest thing I’ve ever touched,” he says, bursting into joyful laughter. “Oh man, this summer I went off in the woods with my band and had the most utterly cosmic week. It was just pure kismet.”
He and his band set up in a cabin north of Peterborough, ON. “We just basically took over this old 1960s cabin, moved all the furniture to the sides and put up a bunch of microphones.”
They had no intention of making an album, they just wanted to see what they could create.
“Lightning just kept striking over and over again,” Mangan says. “We were looking at each other like ‘whoa, this is crazy.’”
It was a similar story with “Call Me Up High,” a single on Being Elsewhere. Mangan spent some time in Los Angeles with Canadian producer duo Matt Schellenberg and Matt Peters, who go by the moniker deadmen.
“It was that same kind of creative explosion, lightning-in-a-bottle thing where everyone kept having great ideas and every great idea led to another great idea.”
“It all just happened in a flash. It doesn’t sound typical to how most of my music sounds: melancholic, indie folk. It is a little more poppy and there’s an 808 drum kit on there,” he says. “But every time I played it for someone, everybody would just start dancing. That’s what led to the music video being ridiculous and silly and full of dance.”
Being Elsewhere will help hold fans over until Mangan’s new hinted-at record is released. It’s such early days there’s no release date or name yet.
He’s still riding the high of creating it.
“As soon as you release music it’s calculable and finite,” he says. “How is it performing or not performing? What are the streams and is it propelling your career? It’s one of the most disheartening parts of being a musician. And the most heartening part is usually the creation.”
“This album, it’s almost like it doesn’t even matter if it ever gets released, the experience of making it was so joyful and exciting.”
If you want to hear more Dan Mangan conversation, check out CKUA host Grant Stovel’s in-depth chat with the artist last fall on the Hidden Track podcast.
“Call Me Up High” from Being Elsewhere:
