Next up from the archives is an interview with Dan Snaith, aka Caribou which was recorded in 2005 around time his The Milk of Human Kindness album was released.
We are huge fans of The Free Design here at Songs To Learn And Sing so it was really sad to hear of the recent death of Chris Dedrick. We had played a few tracks from his 1972 solo album, Wishes back on Episode 289 of the radio show and I remembered that when I interviewed Dan from Caribou we had chatted about The Free Design and Dan's remix for Light In The Attic's Redesigned project. Dan had this to say about The Free Design: "I remember hearing Kites Are Fun and both the sound of their voices and the production, the Enoch Light production, with all sorts of instrumentation and stuff just immediately appealed to me, an interesting combination of sounds. I bought all their old records, old vinyl copies of their records. Somebody from Domino Records in the US told me that there was a guy who was reissuing all of them and doing remixes and I asked to put him in touch with me. I begged to do a remix. It’s on a little label, the guy wasn’t offering big money to do remixes but bands like Stereolab, Super Furry Animals, Mars Volta and Bell & Sebastian were obviously all fans of the band."
Dan also explained how he got into music: "I played piano from a really young age and got into music that way, but it wasn’t until my early teenage years when I got a really crappy kinda keyboard and used my Dad’s computer, an early Mac. The whole reason I started recording on a computer is because when you’re that age, or even my age now, you can’t afford to go and record in a studio. I’ve been working in the same way since then, a sort of DIY aesthetic. I’ve always been as much into the production of music as in the song writing."
