Hello Love

January 25, 2012

Hello Love,

And now it is the year two thousand and twelve. If, as some have predicted, this is the last year of humanity, at least we had a pretty good run at existing. And now on to far more important things.

I just took the first real vacation of my life. I’ve been traveling frequently for a long time, but I’ve never just gone somewhere hot and read books and enjoyed margaritas for a week. So that’s pretty cool. Go me. I needed it. I pretended that I’d never heard of things like Facebook or Twitter. I have since remembered that they exist. So that’s pretty cool.

It’s already stacking up to be a busy year. To begin with, we’re going to Europe and Australia very soon. To boot, we’re going to be supported in Europe by one of my favourite Canadian bands Zeus. If you don’t know them, you should feel ashamed of yourself, but relieved to now know. For some of our European dates, we’ll also have our usual compadres The Crackling on board. That’s Kenton’s band – and he also plays drums when it’s my turn to sing. So that’s pretty cool.

We’re also shooting TWO music videos in the next few weeks! Soon we will have visual accompaniment for two songs from Oh Fortune: “About As Helpful As You Can Be Without Being Any Help At All” (directed by Stuart Gillies) and “Post-War Blues” (directed by Kevin Eastwood, who also produced an acclaimed feature film called “Eco-Pirate” about Paul Watson, an original co-founder of Greenpeace who now wages aggressive nautical war on illegal whale hunters through his organization Sea Shepherd)”.

If I can be afforded a moment of pure vanity here, I wanted to also share the news of some recent press. Oh Fortune received unanimous glowing reviews from big British publications like NME, The Guardian, Q and Uncut. All this was topped off with a brilliant pull-quote from The Sunday Times in London: “On a beautiful record that balances lyrical bleakness with bursts of colour, Mangan confirms his position as one of the most thought-provoking writers of his generation.” So that’s pretty cool. Imagine that. We are now astronomically huge all over the world. Watch out, Beyonce!

Here are the dates that I want you to know about. Join us, won’t you?