2010s 337 Items

The sound of Spirit was born out of falling in love with playing the piano again. About a year and a half ago, my girlfriend surprised me with a borrowed piano. It wasn’t in the best shape, but it made itself at home in my apartment and I started playing it every morning… just messing around at first, but it slowly became a morning ritual I couldn’t shake.

As our Secular Sabbath events developed and moved around the world, we were fortunate to be able to meet and experiment with some inspiring musicians. Out of these experiments, new ideas were born and turned into songs with artists like Thomas Bartlett and Ólafur Arnalds, whose musical genius now grace this record. When I worked with each of them, both happened to play 80’s era Yamaha pianos. At a certain point, I knew I needed to get one for myself:

the tone was speaking to me, through me. The first piano shop I wandered into in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and the first piano I see is an ’84 Yamaha U3 (a special edition hybrid!) It was the very piano I was looking for. It was fate.

My morning piano ritual met my new piano in my favorite studio. I made a rule for myself that I would start something brand new every day, work on that for 2 hours without judgement and just see what I came up with. Out of the many sketches, Spirit started to take shape: a collection of songs that I did alone in the studio with just a piano, intertwined
with collaborations with some of my favourite piano-based musicians. These are songs about love in my life, but also about the love for piano brought back into my life.

A sum of Benny's real-life observations and insights on love, held together by his soft rock inspired songwriting, jazz instrumentation, leading piano and distinctive vocal. The album was inspired by and written in cities all over the world, including New York, LA, Tokyo, Paris and Benny's hometown of Amsterdam. The album celebrates collaboration, with Mayer Hawthorne, Cornelius, Sukimaswitch (the Japanese Steely Dan), Mocky and Faberyayo among the featured artists.

This box includes the 'Born To Die - The Paradise Edition EP' and a printed inlay. It also holds space for your "Born To Die" (it's not included here)LP as well.

In 2014 Dan Snaith aka Caribou released Our Love to overwhelming critical acclaim and massive fan support. Now Caribou returns with his seventh studio album Suddenly, an album about family and the changes we go though as those relationships evolve.
Suddenly is the most surprising and unpredictable Caribou album to date. Though it retains the trademark Caribou warmth and technicolour, this album is littered with swerves and left turns, and amazes with it’s yet unheard nuances, samples and hooks.
As Snaith puts it, “these albums are like photo albums for me – when I look back at the old ones, they’re a snapshot of my life at that time, full of people who are close to you”. This is the drive to continue to make Caribou albums. Full bodies of work where Snaith is able to evaluate things, look at those around him and celebrate them. As his passion and joy in music making remains as fresh as ever, Suddenly is the purest example of this yet.