One of my podcast highlights of the week is listening to Grant Lawrance’s (@GrantLCBCR3) podcast on CBC Radio 3. This week’s podcast was a little different than usual, but was one of the best ones I have heard in a while. I guess Grant has a regular feature on his radio show called the “Full Album Rollout” which boils down to inviting an artist on air with him while they play the album track by track. The bonus to this format is that it gives an opportunity to hear the artist’s insights into the songs. Pretty cool idea.

I have been listening to Dan Mangan’s Oh Fortune for about a week now, so it was a timely opportunity for Dan to show up on the podcast in this format. With the huge success of his last album here in the Canadian scene, Dan had a lot to live up to. His song “Robots“ (you should really follow that link) was a huge succes and I think it left everyone wanting to hear a similar repeat on this album.  On the first few listens, nothing popped out the way “Robots” did when I first heard it. While I was a little disappointed at that, I still found myself putting the album on again and again. I would hear my wife playing it in the bedroom and find my self starting the album on my laptop.

The album sounds very Owen Pallett, Final Fantasyish on it’s opening track, “About As Helpful As You Can Be Without Being Any Help At All.” It really sounds nothing like what I have come to expect from Dan Mangan, and that’s not a bad thing, It is refreshing to hear artists use orchestration in their music. Listening to the podcast today helped me to gain a relationship with this album as all the songs were familiar. When that familiarity was combined with Dan’s commentary it really helped certain songs to pop out at me. Most significantly was his song, “Post War Blues.” See the video below to enjoy this song. The song sounds a bit poppy, but when you listen to the lyrics you will find it is quite a heavy song. “Starts With Them, Ends With Us” is a great example of a song really taking life after hearing the artists story behind it. I will let you listen to the podcast to get hear Dan’s story, but before you do I recommend heading over to Dan’s Radio 3 page and giving the song a preliminary listen.

As promised, here is the video for “Post War Blues.” I hope you do yourself a favor and listen to Oh Fortune. It is definitely on my list of favorite albums this year.