Dan Snaith, formerly Manitoba, now Caribou - all-round one-man-band’s ethos is simple: ‘It’s always very much music to me, the thing that excites me is sound and aesthetics and the way that music makes me feel.’ His new album, ‘Andorra’, is a melodic funfair, encompassing dream pop, lush production and swirling hooks. As research for the record, Snaith fervently catalogued sounds and chord progressions, in order to find the ideal combination of melody, rhythm and timbre: ‘There aren’t that many chords or chord sequences in the world that humans like to listen to’, he explains, ‘I went through loads and loads of different songs, from any band from any time or whatever, not for the production really, but for how the songs were put together- the lyrics and the harmony and how all those things work together. I found there were so many common trends as I looked through these songs, a lot of songs would be just the same as another song from twenty years before.’ Though Snaith has a Ph.D in Mathematics, he’s reluctant to emphasise an analytical backdrop to this research. As with Caribou’s music, he prefers to advocate an all-encompassing, all-embracing approach: ‘It wasn’t about being too analytic and sitting down and figuring out some chord sequence that I liked and then using it. It was just about figuring out what I find interesting about melodies and what I find interesting about how they can carry emotion and how they can make changes and harmony and stuff like that. Not about using other people’s ideas, but exploring what interested me about that melody or sound.’ ‘Andorra’ doesn’t broach complex social issues, or allow for personal commentary-‘My music isn’t about chronicaling my life, or about social things going on, it’s about the enjoyment of how much I love making music and listening to music. The album is composed of minute masterpieces, which, though they flow seamlessly into one another, also stand their ground alone. The latter was Snaith’s main aim when writing the record- ‘This time I wanted every song on the album to be like an actual song, an actual composition. I had all these ideas, like arrangement, melody and stuff. It wasn’t like I was thinking ‘what’s this song going to go into next’, I just put them in the order that made the most sense to me.’

Though the above principles translate well in the recording studio, they seldom come across as encouragingly whilst playing live. Though, in typical Caribou fashion, Snaith is unfazed: ‘It’s not like it’s ever been a problem, like ‘how are we going to play this song live’? There are some songs on the album that we can’t play live, so we just don’t play them, or if we have to change them a lot to play them live, we just change them.’ While this attitude appears nonchalent, the reality encompasses late nights, rehearsals and a lot of hard work- ‘We play together for a month every day, for, like 8 hours. I’m lucky that the guys in the band are all amazing musicians, so we just took the songs and said ‘let’s try you playing this, and you playing that’, then discussed whether we wanted to play them like they were on the album or differently to how they appear on the album. It’s an enjoyable process, you know.’ Given Snaith’s overarching interest in aesthetics, it’s not surprising that he plays a large role in the production of the visuals for his live show- ‘In the past the videos we had were by Delicious 9 - a Dublin-based group of animators. We used them for the last two tours before this, but this time around, because I wanted more freedom to improvise as musicians on stage, it was important to me that the videos not be so narrative, because the narrative structure just ties us to playing the songs in the same way. This time it’s more like patterns and geometric shapes than lighting effects or strobe-y effects. Myself and Ryan in the band have put them together actually.’

Yet, while Snaith cultivates the image of a laid-back musician (to the extent that he conducts this interview between trips to a hot spring spa in the Rocky Mountains’), very little in the realm of Caribou is left to chance. He orchestrated the seemingly chaotic soundings of ‘Andorra’ according to his own directions-‘It was more of a conscious decision last time to have a variety of things going on. I like the fact that it starts with these kind of euphoric, joyous pop songs or whatever, and ends more like everything has fallen apart a bit and all that enthusiasm’s gone. The end takes a weird kind of left turn, I guess’-and his previous incarnation’s name was specifically chosen for its cultural signifiers-‘ Manitoba is, like, a province in Canada, so I wanted the name to have the same remote Canadian connotations’. Snaith, while not self-absorbed, appears to often become lost inside his own head. On writing music, he states that ‘I usually start writing with a bass-line, just a bass or a keyboard, and that would leave room for me to fill in all the harmonies in my head. I leave lots of space for the arrangement while I’m doing it’; While discussing the connection between music and mathematics, he is equally mentally absorbed: ‘It’s such an aesthetic thing for me. It’s not about over-thinking things or being too conceptual. Or conceptual at all about anything. Both things are kind of creative, and things that I can get lost in my head with and kind of play around with ideas and create something…’ Indeed, he admits that it’s kind of a relief to return home after touring, with an empty mind and a renewed vigour- ‘It’s kind of nice to have some space to sit down until something new begins. I kind of like the idea that when I get back it’s a clean slate and I can start again.’

Ailbhe Malone is 21 years old. Her father told her the other day that she was 'going to change the world'. She remains sceptical.
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