Juno Award winner Caribou says he’s finally carved out his own sound

TORONTO – Caribou’s Dan Snaith is a math guy, methodical and curious, but even he seems a bit mystified by his oblique career path.

Over 13 years and three monikers (two of which included Daphni and Manitoba, the latter dropped after legal threat), the Dundas, Ont.-raised Snaith has released whole albums devoted to cerebral house, sunny shoegaze, pastoral electronica, and bubbly psychedelia, music that burrowed into the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s with record-nerd zeal and excess technical finesse.

But in 2010 with “Swim”‘s ornately decorated dance music, he found something miraculous: a sound that would actually hold his interest.

So instead of unravelling things again four years later, Snaith has followed that thread and created the plushly absorbing new album “Our Love.”

“I’m proud of the earlier records that I made, but one thing when I look back at them, I think: ‘Why are they just hopping all over the place stylistically like that?’” Snaith said recently in a telephone interview from London.

“They’re so different and they’re so beholden to particular music of the past that I was excited by. … But it should be my music. There should be some kind of common thread that unites them all.

“‘Swim’ was the first time I thought, well, I’ve carved out my own little patch of musical territory here. It sounds like me. It’s more personal to me, the lyrics were kind of personal for the first time, the sound seemed my own. It was obviously influenced by things but not totally referencing some particular thing.

“And because of that it felt like it was a bunch of doors or options or paths that I could take opening, rather than the end. … I kind of see (these records) as siblings. They’re not the same thing, but they’re related to one another.”

For Snaith’s talk of fractured through-lines, “Our Love” feels eerily like a tapestry of the disparate designs he assembled over the years. It’s infused with ambient, psychedelic, house, pop and jazz. It’s crowd-pleasingly tuneful, hypnotic but danceable, intricate but unfussy, and emotionally transportive.

Although standout singles abound — celestial “Silver,” pledge of allegiance “Can’t Do Without You” and the gorgeous, tortured “Back Home” among them — the album as a whole smears into a dreamy reverie, so consistent is the wistful mood.

Again, all sounds here were subject to Snaith’s magnifying-glass inspection, but his infamous process — which routinely involved 18-hour sessions in creative isolation — had to change, due largely to a change in Snaith’s personal life. He has a four-year-old daughter.

“Yeah, I don’t do that anymore,” he said. “That was one of the things I had to figure out … am I reliant upon having a massive, crazy amount of time? Or can I figure out a more balanced way of doing it?

“I still work every day if I can but there were long periods of time when my daughter was really young that I’d be the person taking care of her most of the time or split evenly with my wife, kind of thing. My daughter would go for a nap and I’d get a couple hours of work in.

“I think the fact that I was fitting it in around the rest of my life like that — that’s part of the reason it’s about such personal themes and about the things going on in my day to day life more.”

Though “Our Love” is musically vibrantly coloured, the lyrics are all about grey areas. Snaith wanted to look at relationships with a wide-angled lens, capturing love both lived-in and faded. So he can tenderly sing a sweet song of devotion like “Can’t Do Without You” alongside something as frustrated as “Back Home,” on which he hums: “How can we fix our love, now that we know it’s broken?”

“Two of my close friends have been through divorces in the past few years while I’ve been making this record, essentially,” he explained. “And both that song and ‘Silver’ on this record kind of chronicle those stories to a certain degree.

“And also, just my whole experience of being the age that I am in my mid-30s and wanting to write about love. I don’t mean just partnership with your romantic partner, but with your children, your family, your friends, and even the people who are going to hear the music I’m making. My relationship to music itself. Those are all the things that are important to me, I guess.

“And all of those relationships are more complex than they were when I was in my early 20s. There’s more texture. There’s more happiness and sadness and contradiction right next to one another. I wanted to capture that — so some of the songs are both melancholy and euphoric.”

Looking back, “Swim” wasn’t only a galvanizing creative force for Snaith personally, it was also something of a commercial breakthrough. He didn’t exactly scale the peak of the Billboard chart — “Swim” hit No. 97, still his highest placement — but it won Snaith his first Juno Award and what at least felt like a broader audience.

He was, he admits, “mystified” by the success. He felt “Swim” was his most idiosyncratic record, certainly compared to its “poppier” predecessor “Andorra” (which earned Snaith the Polaris Music Prize).

He analyzed the situation — of course — and came away believing that perhaps “Swim” stitched together a few threads that were fluttering around popular music. But the fact is, the record’s success carried something of a happy-accident quality to Snaith.

“That’s why it was so wonderful,” he said.

In fact, for all the meticulous thought that he focuses into his music, Snaith has never been calculated in his approach.

His music has always simply reflected his life, sometimes with surprising clarity — but perhaps never before from the intimate angles of “Our Love.”

“When I look back on the records I’ve made over the years … I see them as a kind of photo album or a diary,” he said. “The records that I made remind me intensely of those years. If it’s, say, a record that’s been influenced by a certain type of music, like crazily searching for records in that genre at that time, being super excited by things going on — it just reminds me of my life at that time.

“(My career) has just been reacting to things going on in my life and going on around me. That’s still the case. It’s still very much a diary.”

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