Canadian musician Dan Mangan, above, performs at Spring Lakes Friday night as part of the Wintersong Music Festival 2023.
Mangan has won two Juno awards and has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Australia, having released 5 studio LPs and numerous EPs and singles. He has scored for feature film, as well as television for Netflix and AMC. He is also a co-founder of Side Door, a marketplace platform connecting artists with alternative venue spaces for in-person & online shows.
At the 2012 Juno Awards, Mangan was awarded New Artist of the Year and Alternative Album of the Year for Oh Fortune.
Oh Fortune was also long-listed for the 2012 Polaris Music Prize and received three Western Canadian Music Awards for “Rock Album of the Year”, “Independent Album of the Year”, and “Songwriter of the Year”. To boot, “Rows of Houses” was named “Best Song” by the CBC Radio 3 Bucky Awards. Mangan has won six Buckys to date, the most winning artist in the award’s history, and is the only artist to win “Best Song” more than once.
In April 2019, Mangan, “the man known as the nicest guy on the Vancouver music scene” performed two songs (“Troubled Mind” and “Just Fear”) on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
In April 2022 he released the non-album single “In Your Corner (for Scott Hutchison)”, a tribute to Frightened Rabbit bandleader Scott Hutchison following his death in 2018. He followed up in July with “Fire Escape”, the video for which starred actor Steven Ogg as a personification of a self-critical inner voice taunting and tormenting Mangan.
Both songs were eventually announced as part of the tracklisting for his seventh studio album, Being Somewhere.[19]
After the touring cycle for Oh Fortune, the band took a short hiatus. Dan became a father during this time and scored a soundtrack with Jesse Zubot for the feature film Hector and the Search for Happiness. For their work, Mangan and Zubot were nominated for a Canadian Screen Award in the category of Best Original Score. In that same year, Dan was also nominated for Best Original Song for Wants, a song he contributed to the film The Valley Below.
