Yoo-hoo, Caribou

Dan Snaith's Hearts on Fire interview, part one

Dan Snaith’s Caribou is in town this weekend for two shows: one at History, one at Massey Hall. History is sold out; there are a handful available for Massey (where it will be much harder to dance in the balconies).

He’s one of many reasons I wanted to write Hearts on Fire: not just because I’m a fan, but because he embodies the strange pathway to success that several Canadian artists travelled in the early to mid-2000s, making music not normally associated with this country’s musical history. Music that sounded like this:

When Snaith/Caribou won the Polaris Prize in 2008 for his album Andorra, most of the mainstream Canadian music industry had no idea who he was. And yet if you walked into a record store anywhere in the U.S. or Europe that year (when there were still record stores), you were likely to see Caribou front-racked if he was in town to play for thousands of people. Which he often was.

Two years later, after the release of his 2010 masterwork Swim, his audience started growing exponentially. Today, he’s a legacy artist whose new music still draws in new listeners.

This month I’ve seen a few “best of the first half of the 2020s” lists start to surface: Snaith is one of the only Canadians there, either as Caribou or his more straight-up techno project Daphni. Pretty good for an electronic artist in his late 40s.

His latest, Honey, features what might as well be a cover of a Gen X classic, and I’d swear that this video features footage of CityTV’s Electric Circus:

I spoke to him in early 2020 for this piece in the Globe and Mail, and piggybacked all my Hearts on Fire questions into my alotted time. The conversation has been reshuffled to run chronologically: part one of two is below for paid subscribers only.

In it: we talk about his high school band in Dundas, Ontario, with the most embarrassing name ever; being a prog-rocker jazzbo in a town of hippies and grunge kids; having a very early Vangelis record both terrorize and inspire him and Koushik; stealing a sampler from his high school; seeing Plastikman play in a Hamilton basement; playing in battles-of-the-bands with early incarnations of the Junior Boys; other local inspirations; ripping off HMV big-time, bringing an unknown Four Tet to Toronto in 2000 and confounding Kevin Drew; being bullied into changing his name by a New York punk; and learning to reverse-engineer his records in a live context.

In part two later this week, we’ll talk about his landmark album, 2010’s Swim, up to and including 2020’s Suddenly. He’s not doing any press for Honey, so might as well enter a time machine: