Beloved B.C. musician Dan Mangan on his new album, Natural Light

Vancouver's Dan Mangan has always had a knack for providing comfort on a rainy day, a moment of reprieve during heavy times. His 2018 track, Troubled Mind, captured both the woe and the absurdity of the world as we know it, and 2022's In Your Corner (for Scott Hutchison) mended hearts broken by the loss of a Scottish music legend. 

His latest album, Natural Light, released Friday, builds on his polished folk sound and honest, sometimes validating lyrics through songs like  Cut the Brakes, Diminishing Returns and Soapbox. 

He's been playing the latter of the three at live shows for a couple of years. It's become a hugely important song for Mangan. 

"It's about the, sort of, what is it about us that we repeat our worst histories over and over and over and over again? And how can we learn from those things? Why do we fall into fear? Why do we fall into hatred? Why can't we just be good to each other?" he said. 

"Everybody wins, you win, you feel good when you're kind and other people win … and yet the scarcity mentality is sort of, I don't know if it's driven into us in a Darwinian sense, into our evolution, we feel like we must protect ourselves so deeply.

"It just sort of seems to be becoming more and more and more relevant as the months go by."

Mangan sat down for an interview with CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Where does the title Natural Light come from?

This album did have a different title for a little while — it was called Contained Free, which was sort of like a mantra coming into the record. I wanted to feel contained. I wanted it to feel like it was this thing that happened all in one place, but I wanted it to feel creatively uncontained. So we thought it would be, and we delivered it to [the label] Arts and Crafts. They were like, 'we really like this record, but we feel like the title is a bit academic, or heady or cerebral or something, could you think of a title that was a little bit more in line with how the record feels?'

I was really frustrated. Once you've closed the door on a decision, you think that you don't have to deal with that anymore. And so I went upstairs and had a shower, and I turned off the light in the bathroom, and I cracked the blinds. I prefer to bathe in natural light. And it just occurred to me that this record feels sort of like when light is coming through a window, the sunlight is coming through, and you see all the dust particles. I feel like this record feels like those little dust particles. 

It Might Be Raining is the first track on the album. What's the inspiration behind that song?

My kids are 12 and eight, and I feel as they approach their adolescence that I'm thinking about their world and thinking about the world as it was when I was their age in the 90s, and what a different world it is, and in some ways what a totally similar world it is. I realize that there are going to be hardships in their life from which I cannot spare them, and I don't know what those hardships necessarily are.

They're going to go into the world and they're going to discover things that speak to them. When I was a teenager, I found music, I found art, I found films that had nothing to do with my parents. That felt good. It felt like I was seeing myself articulated back. And so it kind of breaks my heart that they're going to go out in the world and they're going to discover things that speak to them that have nothing to do with me personally. And that's beautiful, and that's what I want for them. But it's hard.