Polaris 2008 Preview: Caribou

09/25/08 5:50pm

by Matt Littlefair (CHARTattack)

Caribou's Dan Snaith doesn't expect to win the 2008 Polaris Music Prize, but ChartAttack caught up with the man behind the animalistic moniker at his home in London (England — you know, the good London) and talked about Andorra, the 2007 masterpiece that's landed him on the elusive Polaris short list.

ChartAttack: What did you do when you found out you were nominated?
Dan Snaith: Let me see if I can remember. I think I heard first not from Steve [Jordan, creator of the Polaris Music Prize], who's running the prize, but from a friend or something that somehow knew. So I thought she was kidding. But then shortly after that, I talked to Steve and yeah... It was great.

Were you actually surprised?
Yeah. I mean, with the independent way of making and releasing music, thinking about prizes is not something I'd ever thought about previously or even expect to experience, so it hadn't even crossed my mind.

On Andorra, there are five songs that bear girls' names as titles. Are there real life counterparts to the songs?
There aren't actual girls behind it. The whole process for this album was about writing pop songs, which is the first time I've really tried to do that, or this is as poppy an album as I'm likely to ever make, I suppose. The most important thing for me was the melody and the composition and the harmony of the song. The lyrics were written to follow whatever kinds of emotions were evoked by the melody, I suppose. And the lyrics are, you know, the classic pop song is a love song, so I kind of sketched the lyrics around a basic love song set-up, either people falling in or out of love. The names are characters in the sense that the melodies are the characters rather than human beings.

You picked some names from antiquity, both from mythology and historical, like Niobe and Irene. Figures like Niobe are quite tragic. Did that play into your writing?
Is that right? The reason I picked "Niobe" is actually from Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum. I was reading it at the time. In this museum, one of the characters is like a security guard or curator, and it's like a ship's figurehead. So I guess that would make sense that the ship would have drawn that name from antiquity or whatever. Oftentimes, the name would have to fit the kind of syllables to have the sound of the word fit well around the melody. Names are really good like that. They're often quite mellifluous and fit more easily or more elegantly around a melody than trying to actually communicate some complicated thing through language. Whatever name would come out would fit that melody or that song.

You've gone and answered my next question already. I'm going to go ahead anyway... "Melody Day" seems like a self-reflexive nod towards a sharper focus on melody and songwriting. Is that at all accurate?
Yeah, that's a perfect example of that. As well as being the first song on the album, it's the first song that I'd made after being away on tour for a long period. And having not recorded, it was like this joy of getting back to making music. I just kind of opened my eyes and sung like a kind of demo take of the words, and the whole song was written like that, off the top of my head. It wasn't conscious, but there's probably no coincidence that the character, that the word "melody" appears there.

Describe your ideal melody day.
I think I've to some extent answered that, too. The excitement for me is being back to fully indulging my love of sound and melody and music and just kind of being in my crappy room where I record, and getting to disappear into my head — just kind of getting to toy around with melodies and music and letting that conjure up emotions and the joyous excitement of making music. I guess just getting lost in my head has always been my ideal thing to do.

For the sake of argument, let's say that you do win the Polaris Prize and you had to spend it on one really extravagant indulgence. I need to stress — "have to" here — what would that be?
Oh man... Before you phoned, I thought, "He's going to ask me what I'd hypothetically do." I didn't even have an answer for that, but now you've put even more restrictions on it... You know what, actually there's this — now this is only because I was reading about this recently — Virgin's offering space travel in the near future. It may not have been Virgin, but I think it was them. The first flights are around $200,000 and, and who's the first Captain Kirk... What's his name?

Shatner.
Thanks. I'm apparently having a total cultural meltdown right now. Shatner gets to go for free on the first ride, but then after that first ride, they're hoping the price will come down to about, coincidentally enough, $20,000. Obviously there's no way I'd actually do that, but that's the only thing I can think of right now that has a $20,000 price tag.

What would you actually do with the 20 grand — no restrictions this time?
I'm really not expecting to win, so I really don't have a clue what I'd do with it. I'd just be in a state of shock holding a giant novelty cheque.

Everyone makes a huge deal about your mathematics background [Snaith holds a PhD in pure maths]. Did it actually influence what you did on Andorra?
I think mathematics is more creative than people imagine it to be. It's very much a disappear into my head, play around with ideas kind of thing in the same way that that's what I enjoy about music. It's a purely cerebral, creative process. I don't want to use the word cerebral because they're both quite emotional and quite exciting things on a gut level, but not in a physical way — because I'm bad with things in the physical world and better with things that live inside my head.

If you had to pick any other animal moniker, what would it be and why?
I feel like — this is my perspective as somebody who has been sued for trademark infringement — but I feel like the world of trademarked animal names is pretty crowded already. Maybe it would be good to go for something much more mundane that has no cache whatsoever, like Cow or Pig or Rat.

But there's already a band called Ratt, but they spell it with two T's.
Oh yeah, so let's take Rat off the list.