Spend a day in the life of Dan Mangan and you’ll soon realize that he is the quintessential DIY musician. True, the Vancouver-based alt-folk singer /songwriter does have a manager and he is signed to Arts & Crafts. But the multi-dimensional young artist is still very much involved in every aspect of his career.
For example, when 24 hours recently caught up with him for a one-on-one sit-down at the Sandbar, he was just starting out a long day of PR, pep talks and music-playing.
On the agenda was a radio performance at 100.5 PEAK FM.
Afterwards, he made an appearance at the Biltmore to cheer on a room full of PEAK Performance Project contestants and then he was off to an in-house session at Red Cat Records to help promote the vinyl release of his sophomore album, Nice, Nice, Very Nice.
There was a time when a signed musician with a schedule as jam-packed as that would have been chauffeured around by label exec handlers. Not anymore. The interweb has changed the music industry so vastly that aspiring rock stars have to take charge of their own careers. The alternative? Keep their day jobs and go no where – or worse, get taken to the cleaners by industry vultures, who can smell a business-illiterate artiste a mile away. In other words, would-be musicians waiting around for multi-million record deals to fall into their laps better wise up to the new music industry reality.
Mangan has. Of course, he’s not your average glory monger. Ergo, skyrocketing to stadium-rock status with a one-hit cash grab isn’t his main objective.
“I’m not interested in spiking,” says Mangan, who’s clearly in it for the long haul. “I just want to keep growing and growing. Some people do it into their 50s and 60s and are still gaining more fans. Look at Radiohead – they’re in their 40s and they’re still telling hip 18-year-old scenesters what’s cool. That’s pretty amazing.”
But the road to Radiohead ranks is not an easy one. For one thing, you need to accumulate an impressive body of killer tunes, but you also need to know how to work social media to your advantage. Mangan has been working hard on both fronts. For the last several years, he’s been honing his craft, booking his own tours, taking care of his own accounting and learning his way around the back-end of a website.
“I was about 20 years old when [I decided ] that this is what I wanted to do and I was going to do everything that it took to make this happen,” recalls Mangan. Later adding: “I figured if I want to do music all the time, if I don’t want to get another job, then I should treat it like it is a full-time job … I get up in the morning, 9/9:30 – not too early, but still morning – and then I brew coffee and sit at my computer and go online and figure out what I should be doing.”
And contrary to what starry-eyed hopeful musicians may be thinking, scoring a record deal with a reputable label last May has done nothing to diminish Mangan’s work ethic.
“The idea of getting signed means that your career is basically just starting,” he says, referring to the fact that advances are more or less a thing of the past. “Chances are that record label doesn’t have any more money than you do.”
