Caribou

0:00Thanks so much, Dan, appreciate it. Yeah, nice to meet you. You as well. A big tour. You're going all over the world this year. Yeah, we really are. This is uh, this is still, we've been, it's about a month and a half now we've been touring and it's been going for a while. It's fun. You've gone to some pretty cool places. I don't know if you've been in China before in Japan, all those countries. I've been, we've played in China a few years ago actually, but not in either Beijing or Shanghai. And we've been to Japan a few times, which is always great. I've been looking forward to both, never been to Korea, I've been playing in Seoul. Right, so. It's exciting. It'll be received well. I think they're big into this dance music that you're putting out now. I get dance music. Is that what it is? I don't know, yeah. Some of it is, for sure. I mean, that was how I was thinking of it. I was thinking of making music like for a club, for people to dance to.

0:51It's not a huge departure from Andorra, but it is definitely sonically different. Yeah. Conscious decision to move in a different kind of direction. Yeah, definitely. I always want to, I felt like, you know, the last few albums had been kind of pointing in a direction. And that I'd kind of reached the limit of what I thought I could do or wanted to do with that kind of idea. I always want to keep changing things. You know, it keeps it interesting for me. I don't know how, you know, that's what it's all about, that it should be exciting and interesting for me, otherwise I wouldn't do it. There was going to be like two records originally, kind of, one under caribou and one just kind of out there dancing music that never really happened. The other stuff wasn't even going to be a record really. It was just for me to like DJ with and for me to, yeah, fly out when I was DJing in the last couple of years.

1:41And then I had these tracks that I really liked, for example, track like bowls on the album. I was like, you know, that seems really exciting to me. It seems like something I want to release somehow, but it took a long while for me to think, wait a minute, yeah, this totally fits next to all the other caribou stuff that I was making. Well, you think you can make caribou whatever you want? Yes, I mean, I guess it was also, it was kind of maybe a subliminally. It was a met way of kind of freeing myself up to think about doing anything. Not worrying about, oh, this is so different, but it doesn't matter because it's not going to be on the record. And so it kind of made me feel free to do whatever I wanted. And then coming back to it, I was like, well, great, this is all good. So it's a, that's a caribou record.

2:27Did you feel like there was a preconceived notion as to what caribou was and that's why it maybe couldn't have been originally? Just that, I mean, no, because I have changed so many, I've changed so much in different iterations over the years. But still, I mean, it's not that I'm particularly worried about that, but you just want to have the kind of, as much a frame of mind of having as much freedom or not thinking about that stuff at all. The less I think about people who like songs on Andorra, which were really kind of songs, how are they going to react to this? I don't want to spend any time thinking about that. That's kind of counterproductive, I think. Andorra was more about writing songs as much as arranging them. Yes.

3:12Whereas it was a little different that we talked about that, because that's really interesting. Well, this, yeah, I mean, Andorra was really, I'd never made music like that, that was kind of composed and properly arranged, had to be concise and had to, really kind of have this, you know, the arc of a pop song, you know, had to kind of fit that kind of trajectory. And this time around, because I was thinking of it in terms of being club music, but also, it is kind of a hybrid. It's kind of these two things simultaneously going on. Some of it is written in the way Andorra was written, and some of it was kind of developed, and the arrangements came out of, you know, de-jaying them and thinking, I wish that part went on for just, just repeated the same thing, you know, which is something that you wouldn't do in a pop song kind of format, just kind of play with the idea of repetition so much.

3:57So it is a kind of hybrid of those two things, which I like about it. Is the live show hybrid then, in that way? Because it's, it's, I don't know if this is true or not. It seems like it's a lot less live instrumentation on the new record. Yeah, but, but I mean, strangely so, I was kind of worried when we got to the stage of kind of thinking about playing these songs live, how are we going to do this? It's, yeah, it is more electronic sound synthesizers, things like that. And, you know, how are we going to play this in a way live is this kind of spontaneous and improvisatory and has that excitement of a live band, but still has all the sonic tails of electronic sounds and that kind of stuff. And we, I mean, we got together as a band or kind of started talking about how are we going to do this and have realized that like the technology for performing live with electronic kind of elements has just come on loads in the last few years, since the last time I really was thinking about trying to play kind of loop based.

5:01Because Andorra was, you know, pretty much like we were a live band. Yeah. You know, we just adapted it in that direction. This time I thought, well, we're going to have to go back and kind of revisit it, this kind of thing that was always a compromise in the past. Like, how are we going to do electronic things live? Never really worked. The technology was never really there to do it. And now it just totally is. Everything we wanted to do was just like, well, why don't we just do this, this, this, and it all worked. Which is really exciting. I mean, it's to me it's more exciting than just playing the songs as a band because we have all those kind of freedoms that we had as a band, but we also have all the added components of, you know, somebody hitting a drum changes something that's going on the video projections or. Everything's connected to everything else on stage. And if we want something that controls something else, it's just as easy as saying, you know, hitting a button and that it's there ready to go whatever we want to take the song off in that direction or whatever.

5:58What are you doing on the show? I mean, last time I said you were playing percussion. Yeah, I still do a bit of everything I sing, obviously. Some of the songs and play keyboards a lot, synthesizes a lot play. Guitar and some songs play drums and some of the songs and percussion. Is the guitar, is that going to be like a guitar though? Or is it a guitar that each note you hit is actually triggering something else? The guitars actually are independent. I mean, they're like, they sound like guitars. I was just intrigued by what we were just saying before. But I mean, yeah, I mean, they're the only kind of instruments that are connected to everything else. But Ryan who plays guitar, I mean, there's a lot of sounds. That was another interesting part of it. There's a lot of sounds on there that like either their guitars, and they really don't sound like guitars on the record.

6:45Or they're another instrument and Ryan's kind of adapted that sound to. So he's doing lots of great things just with lots of effects on the guitar. You mentioned singing before and there were some tracks on the record without vocals. And then you have something like Sun where it's just the word Sun over and over. How important is lyrics for you? I mean, yeah, again, it's kind of two records in that sense that some of them are instrumental and some of them are obviously not lyrically bass. But then some of the other songs are definitely the most, or really the first time the lyrics have been kind of personal to me or about something relevant to me in the past. All the songs have just kind of been fictional sketches of things. And this album, in almost every way, feels like the most personal, the way it sounds.

7:38I feel like I have the kind of most ownership over the sounds on these records. I made up that keyboard sound. I made all the sonic details. It really feels like it borrows the least from the music around me compared to all the other records I've made, I guess. And one part of that is singing. My voice sounds the most like my actual voice, undiscised kind of on this record. And the lyrics for the first time are kind of personal to me about things going on in my life for people around. How come this time? I think it's a kind of progression of confidence, starting to sing on the second record that I made, and I think a bit more every time. And confidence about actually just singing and also confidence about kind of feeling.

8:29Like I can put more of myself into the music and be more open about that kind of thing. And also just the kind of the age that I am, I guess, for example, you know, my two remaining grandparents passed away and while I was making this record, you know, I'm just of that kind of age, one kind of larger life things, whatever it's a cliche, I suppose. But at that kind of age, you know, that people, another, oh, this is about a divorce of friends of ours. First time I kind of felt like these were things that I wanted to write a song about, rather than in my twenties, I was just like, well, you know, I don't really have anything to write a song about it, really. What, are you working on anything new? Is there stuff? No, I mean, I wish it was possible to do both. But at the same time, so we're constantly on tour, we're really well, almost.

9:21It looks like it all summer, almost every day this year we'll be doing a concert. But I also kind of like that about it, that when we're on tour, we're just thinking about what's the way to make this the most exciting and make this work the best possible. Because it is something, it's this own distinct thing from the record, it's not just an afterthought, I want it to be, you know, something different but equally important to the music. And then coming back after that, a year of not making any music at all, that's kind of a nice way to start making music again to think it's totally starting fresh. Yeah, blank slate, and that, you know, there's no kind of exhaustion of, I've been working on this track every day for the past month, it's driving me crazy.

10:11You know, there's none of that, there's like, just at the end of the touring, I'm so eager to make music again. And at the end of the album, I'm being finished, I'm so eager to go on tour. It's kind of a nice rhythm in that way. Oh, you're always happy that way. Yeah. At the end of the day, that's what's important. Yeah, cool. Thank you. Thank you.