Call it The Blackfly Effect.
Vancouver-based songsmith Dan Mangan admits that if it weren’t for the pesky, flesh-eating hellions whose voracious appetites kept him and his trio from venturing outside during a week-long retreat at the Lake Dickey, Ontario, cottage of bassist Jason Haberman, his new album Natural Light would have taken a very different path to fruition.
“You couldn’t really be outside, because if you were, for even a few minutes, you’d get destroyed by the blackflies,” says Mangan. “So, we had to stay inside, and we were in there working the whole time. Maybe if the blackflies hadn’t been there, or it hadn’t been raining, we’d have spent more time outside and less time making music. So, in a way, we’re thankful to the blackfly.”
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Dan Mangan song “Diminishing Returns”
For Mangan, the circumstances surrounding the making of his seventh album, recorded with Haberman, guitarist Mike O’Brien, and drummer Don Kerr, led to the making of what Mangan calls one of his best.
And that’s really saying something. Mangan is a two-time JUNO Award-winning, three-time Polaris Music Prize-nominated singer-songwriter. For decades, he’s brought his unique wit, sonic innovation, and lyrical insight to the indie/folk community, garnering a deeply involved audience. He’s played Glastonbury and Jimmy Kimmel Live, sold out Massey Hall, and scored acclaimed soundtracks for TV and feature film. In 2017, he co-founded Side Door, an online platform that connects artists with alternative venues.
Even with such a strong track record, Natural Light was a surprise of sorts. “At that time, I was planning on making a record, likely in L.A., later that summer, but the idea was to go and maybe cut demos with the guys, and see what happens,” says Mangan. “There was no intention to come out with an album. It was also an excuse to hang out for a week, swim, cook, be creative, make music, and write.
“I’d written ‘It Might Be Raining’ just prior to going there. I was excited about that song, and the night we got there, I was kind of showing it to the guys, and we did about three takes, live off the floor. We were listening back, and we thought, ‘That’s the song!’ It was this really special lightning-bolt moment of feeling that we really captured the essence of something.”
It didn’t stop there. “The next morning, we woke up and were still buzzing from the night’s session. The guys asked, ‘Do you have more up your sleeve?’ I replied, ‘I’ve got 12 more!’ So, the snowball started tumbling down the hill, and just kept gathering speed. We recorded two songs the second day; three songs the third; four songs the fourth, and it was this epic flow of kindred kismet. It had never felt so easy.
“The flavours had to meld, and they had to fall into place over a long span of time”
“To come out with this piece of work that feels so cohesive, and album-like, classic, it was really magical. Especially through the Fall, with the election in America, and all this crazy stuff happening, as we added horns and strings, editing and chipping away at the beds over those continuing months. It was a life raft to have this to work going on throughout a lot of turmoil happening in the world.”
Except for “It Might Be Raining,” none of the songs on Natural Light are brand new compositions, but that doesn’t diminish Mangan’s feeling that this album of intimately expressive folk may be his crowning achievement.
“It feels like an important one to me,” he says. “It’s funny that all of these songs were written over what I’d say were the last five or six years. Some of these songs were in contention for [the albums] More Or Less and Being Somewhere, and they weren’t on either of those. I remember thinking at the time, ‘Oh, I really wanted to record that song,’ and we didn’t. Then, like most things in life, when you reflect on it in hindsight, you’re like, ‘No, it was meant to happen now – and not then.’ So, I think that’s a theme, in general, of this entire record: things falling into place in a way that’s unexpected, and kind of miraculous. I came out of it just feeling gratitude.”
Mangan equates Natural Light’s older material to the concept of egg scrambles, a delicacy he made every morning for his musical compadres while at the cabin last summer. “I have this practice where whatever I made last night goes into the eggs the next day,” he explains. “Things like leftover salad, or leftover meatloaf, you put it in a pan, you warm it up and you make scrambled eggs around it. So, every day I would make these egg scrambles with leftovers.
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Dan Mangan song “Cut The Brakes”
“‘Soapbox’ was written in 2020; I think ‘No Such Thing As Wasted Love’ was written, maybe, in 2018; and a bunch of these songs had to sit in the fridge. The flavours had to meld, and they had to fall into place over a long span of time. Although, when they were ready to go, the pan was hot and ready for them. The leftovers element of how this record came to be is kind of miraculous.”
Natural Light is something of a love letter to family, friends and – symbolically – the planet. “During the last night at the cabin, we listened to the album, front-to-back, in a really rough state. We drank beer and played euchre, and by the end of it, we were all almost in tears… It was like a love letter to each other; the four of us, we have so much love for each other. It was a love letter to my wife; a love letter to my kids; it was a love letter to the world. I sent a Dropbox over to my wife and I half-jokingly said, ‘If an asteroid hits the cabin tonight and the album is obliterated, send this album to everyone.’
“And I realized as I was typing that message to my wife, that so much of our life and our relationship is tied into these songs… And I think that my love for her and my family is easily entwined with my love for the world.
“I want these songs to be an invitation, and I want them to feel like a warm kind of place that you can go,” he continues. “But deep underneath the bedrock of these songs, there’s a real skirt of resistance. And I think that I could only have made this record now; with having kids, and the world that it is, it feels like I’m marrying the two worlds of anger and resistance with a benevolent acceptance that love is at the heart of all the pain, and that we can still find love and bask in that light… at the same time as being aware that we have some serious existential threats at our doorstep.”