Grade: A
Giggles and high-pitched voices pierced the air at Coburg Café on Sunday.
“Dan Mangan was so, so good,” a girl told her three wide-eyed friends. “So good.”
Two days after his first-ever Halifax show, Mangan’s music was still the talk of the town. Last Friday, about 150 people packed The Company House. They gabbed through opening acts Norma MacDonald and Edie Orso, but when Mangan stepped from behind the velvet curtain the chatter ceased. It was as if he anticipated the Company House crowd when he wrote the lyric “I can hear the eyebrows raise when I start singing.”
Mangan took the stage with two fellow B.C. musicians, Laura Smith and Michael-Owen Liston, who took time out of their solo spotlights to join the tour. Smith flitted from trumpet to keyboard to vocals and back. Liston played banjo with a bow.
Between soulful, gritty melodies from his latest release, Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Mangan told classic tour tales of how a train almost hit the band’s trailer, and how he caught swine flu in Ottawa.
“Might wanna sanitize this mic,” he said once – often turning from the crowd to cough.
Mangan has a tendency to push himself too hard. In this case, little sleep and lots of interviews plagued his tour enough that he cancelled his first Halifax show at Dalhousie’s T-room. So it was no wonder Friday’s show was packed.
“I’m a really ambitious person,” he said. “I always take on more than I can. I always work best under fire, too.”
Vancouver homeboy looks like a teddy bear, but there’s a growl to his voice. His tunes seem simple, but his lyrics are deep. Mangan writes unapologetically about what he knows: himself. He’s “a sneaky kind of selfish,” according to one lyric, and Canadians coast to coast are eating it up.
Who can blame them? No one wants to listen to a modest singer-songwriter these days. Ho hum. Seductive is the musician who sings humbly while simultaneously bearing his soul.
A close friend of Mangan’s who attended the Halifax show, said the singer has a nearly undetectable ability to squeeze every last note out of a song as it ends, guiding the crowd, then starting the next tune without losing them for a second. He compared it to squeezing every last drop out of a wet towel. Patrons sipped up every note.
Before he began his final song, Mangan offered two tambourines, a tom-tom and a set of sleigh bells to audience members so they could clamour along to “Robots.” What followed was the single best live song of this year’s Pop Explosion – a sing-along celebration of Mangan’s fast rise to national recognition.
“Robots need love too,” the audience sang, as if gathered around a campfire. “They want to be loved by you, they want to be loved by you.”
As the song finished, the crowd was still hungry enough to spontaneously burst into an a capella verse of this final tune. Here, on the opposite coast from the trio’s home, was the first place on the entire tour the band had experienced an a capella encore call.
“We didn’t plan anything,” Mangan apologized. “Do you guys want a six-minute sad song?”
As the set ended, Haligonians’ hearts were as fuzzy and warm as if they’d just squeezed a stuffed animal. Maybe that’s why women’s voices go up an octave when they recommend Mangan to friends during coffee dates. I doubt it’s the caffeine. Though Mangan certainly mimics the rush of “coffee refills far as I can see.”
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