Dan Mangan - Being Somewhere

Arts & Crafts

“This sixth album moves the needle on again, while never losing sight of his brilliance as a songwriter… Being Somewhere carries a gentle wisdom, filled with kindness… It’s like being given a cosy sonic hug while the world’s storms rage outside and will likely add to the collection of awards already clogging Mangan’s mantelpiece.” – MOJO – 4 stars ****

Dan Mangan’s sixth album strikes a fine balance between the quiet intimacy of his best work and Bon Iver’s most fractalized folktronica… The likes of ‘Fire Escape’ and ‘All Roads’ provide warmth and immediacy without disrupting the delicate mood.” – Uncut – 7/10

Being Somewhere, Dan Mangan’s sixth studio album, cuts incisively but never forgets its underlying thesis: It’s cool to care.

Mangan arms the rebels in the crusade for tenderness. The album is a combative plea for mercy from a manic world and its effects on the psyche. Whittling his sharpest pen to date, Being Somewhere is marked by Mangan’s singular wit and a respectful deference to the quagmire of existence.

“I wanted this album to feel like the inside crook of a familiar elbow on the nape of your neck, a comforting embrace” says Mangan, “These songs are tenderhearted and unfurl like an overdue conversation with a dear friend. They essentially lay out where we’re at, how I’m doing, and how I think I can help.”

571 emails. 100+ hours on the phone and thousands of text messages. A mere 3 days spent in-person together over two and a half years of long-distance work. Such a displaced recording process might make anyone question the concept of being anywhere at all, let alone being somewhere else.

This is how Dan Mangan and collaborator/producer Drew Brown (Radiohead, Beck) manifested Being Somewhere. All components were recorded in isolation and beamed up to the mothership. No piece of the puzzle ended up as expected, and each moment is the fruition of separate, yet conjoined, rabbit holes.

“The hard part was waiting,” Mangan says of the long-distance process, “sometimes it took six weeks to resolve an issue that could have taken twenty minutes had we been together in a room. But Drew’s dedication and talent cannot be understated, and this music doesn’t sound like anything else I’m hearing these days.”

Under the care of Drew Brown’s distinct touch, Being Somewhere forges sonics well beyond the tropes of modern folk music. Helming the project from Chicago, Brown sourced musical contributions from all over North America, the UK and Japan, including work from Joey Waronker (Beck, Atoms for Peace), Jason Falkner (Beck, St. Vincent), Thomas Bartlett (The National, Taylor Swift), Dave Okumu (Arlo Parks, Adele), Mary Lattimore (Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten), and Broken Social Scene frontman Kevin Drew.

Dan Mangan is a two-time JUNO Award-winning and two-time Polaris Music Prize-nominated musician and songwriter. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with his wife and two sons. Mangan has toured extensively in North America, Europe & Australia. He has played Glastonbury and Jimmy Kimmel Live, collaborated with David Grohl, sold out Massey Hall and scored acclaimed soundtracks for television (Netflix, AMC) and feature films. In 2017, he co-founded Side Door, a community marketplace platform for the arts that seeks to democratize and decentralize the entertainment industry by allowing non-traditional spaces to be venues.

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