Dan Mangan is having a very good day. The night before our interview, the affable Vancouver singer-songwriter came from way back in the underdog slot, to take home the Artist of the Year award from XM satellite radio station The Verge, and the $25,000 cheque that comes with it. Mirroring Fucked Up’s unexpected upset for the Polaris Prize the previous night, Mangan triumphed over Joel Plaskett, Said the Whale and Album-of-the-Year winners Alexisonfire. No one was more surprised than Mangan himself, who describes it as a “soft, cuddly moment.”

Congratulations have been pouring in from friends and fans, but when the well-wishers say ‘You deserve it, Dan!’ Mangan becomes cautious. “From Day One, my MO has been that no matter how successful anyone becomes in this or any other business, a sense of entitlement is the most dangerous thing you can have,” he says. “It makes you too comfortable and it’s a precursor to being a dick.”

Mangan may be a keen observer and analyst of day-to-day life and a precocious, extremely talented, extremely hardworking singer-songwriter, but he is definitely not a “dick.” When someone calls their album Nice, Nice, Very Nice, (a line from a poem in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle), you wouldn’t typically expect them to personify that quote, but Mangan seems to do just that. On three occasions during our chat, Mangan needs to be shepherded back to talking about himself, after lengthy tangents regarding how wonderful someone else is.

He describes being a teenager in a semi-affluent Vancouver neighbourhood, where his mother struggled financially to maintain a residence in order to send her sons to a better high school. When Mangan started asking for brand-name clothes to better fit in with his peers, his mom found a global awareness group and sent him off to Guatemala for a two-week reality check.

“We talked to different human rights organizations and health care clinics and just generally tried to absorb what was going on there after 30 years of civil war,” he says. “It was an incredible experience for an 18-year-old kid from beautiful, gorgeous affluent Vancouver.”

At one point, the opportunity arose to musically connect with a group of Guatemalan youth. “There was about eight to 10 guys surrounding one guy with a guitar doing these big sing-alongs in Spanish,” Mangan recalls. “Eventually, I mustered up the courage to go over and say, ‘Hello.’ They just jammed the guitar in my hands and invited me to join them. We spent about four hours passing the guitar back and forth. We did not speak each other’s language, but we had this amazing multicultural experience surrounding a musical instrument. They were poor kids. I think some of them lived on the street and they were huffing glue and offering it to us. It was what they had and they were offering it as a gesture of goodwill. It was a beautiful thing connecting with these people, who had very little.”

Mangan politely declined the glue but claims that two-week experience changed his life. “It’s really easy for us to get inside the bubble, to get so lost in our own heads and our own thoughts. To give yourself a little bit of worldly experience immediately makes you feel kind of insignificant, which is humbling but, at the same time, really freeing. To realize how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things is a really liberating moment.”

The Verge prize will allow Mangan to liberate himself from the debt he’s accrued in his career and to continue touring, connecting and winning over audiences with his congeniality and genuine “nice-guy” persona. There’s little room for excess or extravagance. “I had a bunch of friends that were there at the Verge Awards and the next day, I took them all out for brunch,” he says. “Then I said to myself, ‘That’s it!’ I’m not spending any more money until it’s in the bank and I know for sure it’s there.”

This practical, no-nonsense approach extends to his onstage craft as well. “I’ve been in so many situations where I’ve had to win an audience that was stacked against me and there were times when I was able to do it and times when I wasn’t,” he admits. “Every gig can’t be great. It will happen again, guaranteed.”