When Dan Snaith released his debut People Eating Fruit EP under the name Manitoba in 2000, few listeners could have guessed the dramatic musical transformation that was to come. Over the course of his next three full-lengths, Snaith augmented his standard Boards of Canada-esque electronica with ambient noise, swirling psychedelia, thundering tribal drums and motorized krautrock grooves - and got slapped with legal threats by aging punk rocker "Handsome Dick" Manitoba over his recording name. Changing his moniker to Caribou, Snaith - with the help of peers such as Four Tet and Prefuse 73 - has since been busy redefining the face of indie rock-friendly, hip hop-influenced electronic music.
On the new Andorra, Snaith takes the Caribou sound to new worlds with blissed-out, sugar-high pop songs that bloom like Technicolor flowers and burst with infectious energy, nevertheless staying true to the inventiveness that earns him so much respect in indie circles. In anticipation of Caribou's Chicago performance next week, I spoke with Snaith about his latest album, the art of writing a love song without worrying about the words and his need for musical escapism when he's holed up in the studio for a year at a time.
Phoenix: Judging by the sound of the new album, I'd guess you've probably spent a lot of time listening to some of the poppier British invasion bands of the '60s. Andorra feels like something The Zombies might have done if they'd had access to samplers.
Dan Snaith: Yeah, I mean, The Zombies are definitely the most relevant example [of an influence] for me. The record, for me, was really for the first time about writing melodies and harmonies and countermelodies and chord sequences and arrangements and all those kinds of compositional ideas more than it was … I mean, it's always still about production for me, I guess. But in the past my records have almost exclusively been about production, whereas this time I wanted to write actual pop songs and that kind of stuff.
Phoenix: I read somewhere that in your opinion this album shouldn't surprise anyone who's heard your last few discs, but I would actually argue that it's quite different in a lot of ways. Caribou has always felt like a creature of constant change - there's a shift from album to album in style and sound. Is that a conscious choice or is it more of a natural restlessness?
DS: It's definitely a natural restlessness. I don't think there are any conscious decisions on the record. It's just that if I'm gonna spend a year working all the time on music - I mean, that's what I love doing, so for the past year that's what I've spent my time doing - I wouldn't be doing that if I felt like I was just treading over exactly the same ground. A really important part of it for me is the challenge of being frustrated trying to do something hard that I haven't done before and then finally getting something I'm happy with at the end.
Phoenix: The songs evoke, like you said, that kind of baroque tradition - but they're also more song-like, if that makes sense, in that they make more use of your voice and lyrics than they would have on past records. Do you see yourself as more of a singer on Andorra?
DS: No, not really. [My voice is] always kind of a vehicle for me anyway. I'll have written the melodies and written something that I think is very much a pop song even before there's any lyrics. The lyrics aren't really ever the focus of my music. But I'll have in my head that this is a pop song, and I want it sung by a voice and I want it to sing these harmonies. Obviously, the voice is a unique instrument for conveying emotion, but I'm definitely not a singer. I'm not a natural singer in any sense, though over the years I've become more and more aware of what I can and can't do with my voice, how I can use it, how I can get it to sound the way I want it to and what I can't do with it, both through touring and singing every night and also through recording with it more and more. I get the sounds I want out of my voice, but it's not like a vocal performance. It's not the centerpiece of the song.
Phoenix: I've noticed, though, that a lot of the song titles on Andorra are people's names - "Irene," "Desiree," "Sandy," to name a few. Importance of lyrics aside, if I didn't know any better I'd guess that this album is about girls.
DS: I mean, it is and it isn't, I guess. My personal life is very happy. I've been in a happy relationship for the past six or seven years or whatever, and just generally I'm a pretty happy, content guy. But the music I make is kind of, in a film sense, escapism. I'll be recording in this little room that's not very inspiring and I'll escape into my head and create these worlds of sound with ideas and images that make the mood for the song. When I think of pop songs, pop songs should be about love. And the emotions that the music is conjuring in me when I'm making music are the kind of emotions that are reflected in falling out of love with somebody or falling in love with somebody or whatever. Just the format of making all the songs [on the album as] pop love songs about simple relationships and that kind of thing was more of a vehicle to echo the emotions that I was trying to put into the melodies and compositions, rather than having the lyric lead the way the song feels, if that makes any sense.
Phoenix: You worked with Jeremy Greenspan [frontman of the Junior Boys] on this record for "She's the One." As I understand, it you guys have known each other for some time, having toured together. How did that work?
DS: Well, I've actually known Jeremy for a lot longer than that. I knew him - kind of - in high school. We grew up in the same town and I knew about his band and would play against them in battles of the bands. He was always around. Matt [Didemus], the other guy from Junior Boys, was the one guy in town with a Moog synthesizer. So I kind of always knew about them but didn't know them that well, and then later in life when we both started making music more full-time we became really good friends.
[The collaboration] was just a really natural thing to want to do. I think people think about the Junior Boys in terms of electronic production and synthesizer sounds and things, but Jeremy's also a really good kind of "classic" songwriter. There's a Frank Sinatra cover on his last album. I think that's really indicative of how he thinks about songwriting. I wanted to take those talents - and obviously he's got an amazing voice as well - and put that in a different kind of context, away from the Junior Boys' electro dance music. I mean, I love their records, but I thought it would be interesting to work with him together on writing a song in a different context. Whenever he's on tour and he comes through London [Ontario] he stays at my place, so we had three days off after he'd done a show to work on music together and it came together really quickly and easily and it was really exciting. I think ["She's the One" represents] the best of both of us.
Phoenix: But you're no stranger to having vocalists other than yourself perform on your records before - I'm thinking in particular of the Manitoba era with Up In Flames, some of those songs. How much of that is collaboration and how much is, you know, "Here's the microphone; do your thing"?
DS: Actually, only two singers apart from me have sung on the records, [one being] my friend Koushik, who sang on Up In Flames, and with him we were living in totally different places. And he came up with something really amazing but I wasn't involved in it - I basically gave him a rough instrumental, and he wrote the melody and lyrics around it.
With Jeremy it was very much co-songwriting, which is something that I've never ever done before, sitting there and figuring out the chords and the melodies together. I mean, I'm a pretty solitary worker; I do pretty much everything on my records myself. I sometimes worry that collaboration in music is [about] people getting on each other's nerves and nothing works out the way either party wants it to and you end up with something that nobody's happy with at the end, but it just worked so incredibly well between the two of us.
Phoenix: Do you think you'd try for that kind of collaboration again in the future?
DS: We'll see. I never really have any kind of grand plan for what Caribou is gonna be in the future or what any music I'm doing is gonna be like in the future so it's just kind of whatever's exciting to me. And it has much more to do with the individual person than the idea of "Oh, I want to collaborate with people."
Phoenix: Nearly all the promotional materials I've seen for Andorra have that one quote from Urb: "Sounds like the work of someone given one month to live." I'm assuming that you spent more time on the album than that, but the level of detail in the music is clearly there, and it suggests that there's actually a pretty thorough immersion in it. When you're making a record, do you find that you work that obsessively?
DS: On the scale from casual to obsessive, it's definitely way over on the obsessive end of things. I really feel lucky that I'm getting to do music full-time, and this is what I do; it's what I've always dreamed of doing. So I feel that if I'm going to be doing it and if I'm going to be releasing albums, I might as well do it as well as I possibly can do it and make the albums as well as I possibly can. When I'm recording - it took me about a year of recording, pretty much day in and day out [to make Andorra]. At the end of the day, I'm a pretty harsh critic on myself, and I'm not gonna release anything that I don't feel is as good as I can do.
Phoenix: The percussion on this record nearly steals the show at times, which has been a big element of your last few albums - this gigantic, all-over-the-place drum sound. Do you focus especially on making sure your tracks have huge, high-in-the-mix drums, or is it just kind of something that happens along the way?
DS: I think it's a bit of both, probably. When I'm recording, the physical thrill of playing the music is a big part of what makes the music exciting for me. I'll be working on a track and a really natural thing for me to want to do is pull some drums together and start playing because it's such a physical way of being excited about the music. So it's kind of natural for me to play big, sloppy drum parts over the top of everything. And similarly, in the live show, I guess that's why we have two drum kits. [It] kind of translates the music physically.
Also, I suppose, through listening to hip hop when I was growing up, that's how I learned about samples and drum breaks, and I've spent a lot of time looking for old records with weird sections of just drums produced in a particular way. On my last record I cut up chunks of old records for samples for the drum tracks, but this time around all of the drum tracks on the record were recorded by me, playing myself, which was something new and exciting.
Phoenix: In between this album and your last one, you went back and reissued your first two Manitoba records under the Caribou name. Do you ever miss the Manitoba name?
DS: I mean, legally I can't put it on the front cover of a CD anymore, [but] I'm not really bothered by that. When people say "Manitoba" or "Caribou," it's all the same thing, really. The identity of these records that I put out, one or the other, it doesn't really matter to me either way. I never, ever - apart from being asked about it in interviews - think about the name change anymore. It's not a big deal. I just need a name to be able to release the music that I'm making. Manitoba, Caribou - it's really all the same thing to me.
Caribou plays an 18+ show with Battles, Born Ruffians and White Williams on Nov. 8 at Metro, located at 3730 N. Clark St. Tickets are $16, and the show begins at 8:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/cariboumanitoba or www.metrochicago.com.
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