Caribou
Interview with Dan Snaith
Words: Christian Crider

Dan Snaith is a musical mastermind. Snaith, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, is also the creative drive behind the psychedelic daydream indie rockers, Caribou. Reax caught up with Dan on his last day of freedom before once again hitting the road. Caribou will return to Florida this April. 

REAX: There’s an overwhelming 60s feel to your latest album, Andorra; it’s a distinct departure from The Milk of Human Kindness. What brought this about?
Dan Snaith: The main thing for me was that this record was much more about composition, melody, harmony, and writing the music. This was the first time I’ve ever written the music as opposed to building it out of loops, or adding layers on top of one another in loops, as I’ve done in the past. That was really the focus for me. I wrote all of the songs before I started recording them. I listen to and love lots of different music, but a lot of the pop songs I love were the kind of baroque pop songs from the 60s, which were really exquisitely arranged and carefully put together with lots of interesting instrumentation, aspiring to make a big “world of sound” production. It really appeals to me, I’m recording in this tiny bedroom, but that’s the last thing I wanted it to sound like. I wanted there to be lots of ambition in the way the production sounds.

REAX: In what ways do mathematics and music complement each other, and how does this affect your writing process?
DS: I guess it doesn’t directly. There’s no mathematics in my writing process. It’s very aesthetic, based on what I find exciting or melodies, some kind of emotional cache or whatever. I guess the thing that has drawn me to both of them – something that people don’t generally associate with mathematics – mathematics becomes a different subject after high school, or as you start doing research, it becomes much more creative and abstract, playing around with abstract ideas and piecing them together in different ways. I suppose I see some of that, I enjoy music for a lot of different reasons, like playing around with abstract ideas and fitting together ideas abstractly.

REAX: Your live performances are augmented by a pretty spectacular light show, what affect does this have on you as a performer.
DS: When I go to a show, I want it to be as engrossing and overwhelming as possible. In the past, we’ve had animated music videos commissioned by these guys, Delicious Nine, in Ireland, which were synched up to every song in the show and what we were doing on stage. They were fantastic, but the only drawback to that was that the videos constrained how we could improvise and play together as musicians. So this time around, we were like, “How can we have the visual thing reinforcing what we’re doing with the music, but still have freedom to play together?” So we’ve written this setup on a computer where we’ve programmed optical art, strobe effects and patterns that compliment or augment the music, but it still responds to what we’re playing in a way that we can change things, play together and not be limited by what it’s doing. It compliments what we’re doing, rather than the other way around.

REAX: You’re about to embark on a pretty lengthy tour of Europe and North America, how do you prepare for the long haul of the road?
DS: We finished an equally lengthy tour in the fall, and we all really enjoy it and look forward to it. We rehearsed for like a month before we first started playing these shows. But, I mean, having played a hundred shows together since this album came out, we’ve just gotten so much better and become so much more comfortable playing together as musicians. The show evolving and changing every night takes care of itself. It’s something we don’t have to worry about too much, it just kind of happens. So it’s just something we can enjoy, and the more we do it the better the shows will get.

REAX: Prior to 2004, you were creating groundbreaking electronic music under the name Manitoba. Do you see Caribou as a progression of your previous work, or a new direction all together?
DS: It’s really the same thing to me. I was sued by a guy named Handsome Dick Manitoba, for reasons best known to himself, and was forced to change the name. There was no way I was going to be able to fight it in court. It was going to cost me half a million dollars just to hire the lawyer to do that, and I realized subsequently that it was a good thing because there’s no way I wanted to spend a year in court battling this guy when I could just get on with things, keep making music, and change the name. Yeah, apart from changing the name, nothing really changed for me at that point.

REAX: As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, how does your creative process compensate for the stylistic interpretations of your live band members?
DS: It’s an interesting thing in a number of different ways. Of all the songs on the record, I played all the parts on the tracks apart from guest vocals, samples in tiny bits here and there, but I’ve probably only played each part once. I don’t sit at home practicing the parts and then record them, I just play them once and then come back to them a year later when we start to rehearse the songs, and I don’t even remember how to play my own songs because I’ve only played them once. So, in a way, I’m very familiar with how the songs sound, but in terms of playing them, I’m as new to them as the rest of the guys in the band. So we take the song apart and try different ways of putting them back together. “Why don’t you try playing this, and I’ll try playing this.” Or we’ll take the song in a different direction. And so it’s a second creative process, and something that is much more sociable than the isolated way I record, which is me locked in a room doing everything.

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