Caribou Escapes!

01/13/09 11:56am

by Phil Villeneuve (CHARTattack)

Electro psychster Dan Snaith found his special place... in his head

Dan Snaith, math PhD and the man known as Caribou, has been very busy since the release of Milk Of Human Kindness in 2005. He wrote about 670 songs for his new album, experienced new levels of solitude and learned how to do back flips.

“We toured a lot with the last record,” he says, “and once that was done I really became quite a hermit the last year working on and recording music. In the past, I’ve always been doing school and music at the same time, so this was a real luxury to be able to do this all the time.

“I also took trampoline lessons, which is a good distraction from thinking about music 23 hours a day, and learned to do a couple back flips. I also watched a lot of Werner Herzog movies, and that really is about all I did in the last year.”

So now that we’re all caught up, what’s going on with the acclaimed electronic indie pop wonder these days? For starters, he completed Andorra, a nine-song, swirling sonic adventure and bold new statement. Every track on the gorgeous new record has vocals, and Snaith even let remixers work on some singles for the first time.

“Kieran [Hebden, of Four Tet] is one of my closest friends and I’m actually over at my friend Adem’s right now. He sang on the ‘Melody Day’ remix as well,” Snaith reveals. “I’ve never done remixes before and sometimes they’re just done for the sake of being done. But I wanted them to have some sort of relation to me.

“There are also some other remixes on the way for ‘She’s The One.’ One from Kelley Polar, who I’ve become friends with, the Junior Boys and Hot Chip, who are all friends.”

Snaith is genuinely excited while talking about his new songs, which were recorded alone in his London, England apartment. The fact that the Dundas, Ontario boy recorded it in swinging London had little influence though. Andorra sounds like it came from a magical, mystical place that no one has ever been to.

“To me, making a record is disappearing into my head,” says Snaith. “I’m recording in this crappy little room, a really uninspiring place to work, but I can completely get lost in the music itself, let go and get lost.

“This album is really about songs, not necessarily the lyrics or anything, but more about melody and chord changes and compositions, unlike the last albums. Some of them were more about drone-y kinds of music that had one chord with a trance-like sound. Whereas this album, I wanted each track to be an actual song.”

Though Snaith claims he “ain’t no Pavarotti,” his vocal confidence and scale have improved immensely from his past recordings. Maybe it was the great mountain air of Andorra, a small western European country with the highest life expectancy in the world.

“I went to Andorra last year after I had made some of the tracks on the album that were sounding sort of dramatic and romantic, with really lush arrangements,” Snaith says. “I was imagining Andorra as a forgotten little principality perched up in the mountains forgotten by modernity — a perfect physical home for this music.

“Then it turns out it’s a tax haven full of crappy, touristy stores, cheap booze and tacky souvenirs. It was not at all what I was expecting. So the title refers to more of this place in my head that I envisioned and is sort of a metaphor for me in my gritty, crappy room, escaping to that place. Escapism is the theme here, I guess.”

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Snaith told Chart that the name “Caribou” came to him while on an LSD trip in the woods with friends. Here’s a look at how other “creatured” band names are rumoured to have come about:

Arctic Monkeys — Guitarist Jamie Cook came up with the name while joking with a friend in a pub

The Beatles — John Lennon was known for taking claim for the name, saying it was a wordplay on insects and a beat

Counting Crows — Adam Duritz took the name from a divination rhyme about crows he heard in the 1989 movie, Signs Of Life

Modest Mouse — Comes from a passage out of Virginia Woolf’s The Mark On The Wall

The Yardbirds — Took their name from a well-known nickname for saxophonist Charlie Parker

This feature article is from the October 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. You can purchase the issue in the Chart Shop.