Being Elsewhere Mix by Dan Mangan

Being Elsewhere Mix, which Dan Mangan put out on Arts & Crafts on August 30, 2024, is the Canadian songwriter's eighth album, and it doesn't pretend to be a tidy one. He built it as a mixtape: stripped-down acoustic rerecordings of songs from his previous album, Being Somewhere, sit alongside covers of Bob Dylan, Damien Jurado and the Lumineers and a handful of stand-alone singles he'd released since.

That grab-bag approach is the point. Mangan has said he wanted to slip free of the pressure to make everything cohere and let his competing creative urges share one space, and the result feels like leafing through a songwriter's notebook: warm, unguarded, a little restless. "Say When" is the one that caught on with the countdowns. It's a fitting detour for a two-time Juno winner who started out handing a simply recorded acoustic EP around Vancouver.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.