Dan Mangan
Daytrotter Session - Apr 27, 2012
- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Oh Fortune
- If I Am Dead
- Rows of Houses
- Leaves, Trees, Forest
The greatest folly is thinking that there are any vitamins that can help us lead longer and healthier lives. The salads that we feel like we need every so often just to get “back on track” after eating so shittily for so long, or just being irresponsible and not all that cognizant of what we’re fueling our bodies with, aren’t going to be the magical bullets that we need to extend ourselves into the greener pastures, where we’d like to chew, where we’d hope there will be space for us to live and take our mail. Something that big, that incredible takes a whole lot more. It takes real commitment and a dedication to making the head and the soul sparkle – to make them leafy and fairly buff. We take a great big gulp when we are sure that we’re unprepared to make it cleanly through the obstacle courses that have been laid out and booby-trapped for us daily. We find ourselves looking down over dizzying heights and realizing that we’re less scared of them than we used to me. It’s not that they don’t scare us. It’s just that we’ve been scared way too much and we’ve just learned to cope a little better. We’re aloof to the drop-offs, to the cliffs. Dan Mangan seems to know that there’s little for us to do other than marvel at our incompetency. It’s not that it’s laughable or even sporting of us to do so, it’s just that it’s kind of amazing that we’re able to be unmoved by the very accurate and slightly morbid thought that we’re dying a little more every day and we tend to amplify the impact by cooperating too much. He sings on this session that, “Something’s killing me,” but after listening for a while – to these songs that are heartbreaking in the same kind of way that The Tallest Man On Earth’s songs are heartbreaking – you’re sure that it’s mostly him cutting off his own circulation and finding ways to not count blessings. He sings about something like time’s fortune and just the thought makes me think that we’re heading for another losing season full of losing streaks. Time’s fortune can only mean one thing – that it will outlast us all and that’s its greatest bounty. It will be here long after we’ve rotted.