- Since his pioneering work with Brian Eno in the early 1980s, Daniel
Lanois has been
one of the most influential producers in popular music. His production credits include: U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, and All That You Can’t Leave Behind; Peter Gabriel’s So and Us; The Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon; Willie Nelson’s Teatro; Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball; and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind. Lanois has also made four albums of his own: Acadie, For the Beauty of Wynona, Shine, and Rockets. [see discography]*
Figure 1. Album cover for Rockets
- Born in Quebec, Lanois began his career in Hamilton, Ontario, where
Brian Eno famously sought out his studio. For many years, he ran Kingsway
Studio in New Orleans, while making records in Ireland, France, and
California with U2, Gabriel, and Nelson. Lanois now lives and works
in several locations—among them, Los Angeles—and continues
to produce, compose, record, and perform live. We begin the interview
with questions about these places, and about what impact place
in general has had on his work. Having chosen locations for living
and music-making carefully, Lanois makes an interesting case in today’s
often homogenized, multi-national rock music scene: the same musical
qualities that transcend the local have often been inspired by intensely
regional music cultures. In particular, we try to probe connections
between the Acadian traditions he grew up with and the Southern vernacular
styles he has often worked with.
- Lanois’s latest musical preoccupation has been with the pedal
steel guitar. He is working on an album of solo unaccompanied tunes
on the instrument, and our interview was an excellent occasion to
learn about him as a composer and instrumentalist. His interest in
the pedal steel also resonates with certain qualities of his production
sound, what writers and critics have called “atmospheric,”
“ethereal,” “melancholic,” and “spiritual.”
We were lucky to be given a performance of some of his new pedal steel
tunes in his recording studio in the basement of his Los Angeles home,
which we recorded and include in the interview as streaming sound
clips.
- The pedal steel brings us to a discussion of the 1950s pop duo
Santo & Johnny and early rock and roll. For Lanois, the focus
of popular music has changed over the past fifty years from live performance
(and the documentation thereof) to recordings that stand on their
own. Nonetheless, in a typically postmodern spirit, Lanois has simulated
the aesthetic of older recordings—accidental distortion replicated
by effects and filters. The rest of the interview mainly concerns
Lanois’s personal style as a producer and as an artist. Through
the use of certain “tools” and a particular approach to
the production, he has built (at least the reputation for) a signature
“sound.” While Lanois questions this kind of consistency
in his work, his comments on production and composition nonetheless
reveal bases for consistent sonic elements.
- Popular music producers do not get the press that the “artists”
they produce do; but they make choices that are as “artistic”
as those who play or sing. Like studying other
famous producers such as Phil Spector, Giorgio Moroder, and Quincy
Jones, looking at Lanois’s work teaches us more than studying
just one artist. His work can tell us about the history of
rock music in over the past two decades; beyond individual idiosyncrasies
like Peter Gabriel’s vocal timbre or U2’s political agenda,
Daniel Lanois gives us hints toward common aesthetic qualities of
a range of artists. As a producer of his own music and of others’,
he has had an enormous effect on the development and definition of
genres within popular music: his vision of meaning and depth in music
has rubbed off on a generation’s worth of rock recordings.
- Jonathan Greenberg: How do you like
living in Los Angeles?
- Daniel Lanois: I don’t really
live here. I spend most of my time in Canada and Jamaica, so I’m
only just passing through here. I like it a lot. I think it’s
a great city, great crossroads—always something going on. It’s
much like other cities that I’ve been in [in that respect].
- JG: You had your studio in New Orleans
for a long time. What did you get out of New Orleans musically? Was
there new music to discover there?
- DL: You know, New Orleans is fantastic.
I made a great Bob Dylan record there called O Mercy [listen], my first record [with him], and a Neville Brothers record called Yellow Moon. One thing for sure is that a lot of the great musicians come from the South. And for a Canadian kid to go down there and be exposed to the rhythms, the bass lines, the piano playing, it was really a great education. I met Brian Blade there, a really great drummer. I still work with Brian. We’re doing some shows this summer. We’re gonna do three shows with Dave Matthews in Florida: big places, big stadiums. Should be cool.
Figure 2. Daniel Lanois. Photo by Jennifer Tipoulow
- JG: Did you [as a French-speaking
Canadian] feel any particular kinship being in a historically francophone
area like New Orleans?
- DL: A little bit. I might have felt
more of a connection with some of the rural people, the Cajun community.
But it was architecturally very much what you talk about, Spanish
and French. You can still see all the influence there …
- JG: So, you’ve recorded all over
North America, and you’ve worked in Europe: does where you are
when you’re recording an album, when you’re writing songs—what
effect does that have on the music that you make?
- DL: In Jamaica, where I have my cottage,
it’s a small town, and there’s not a whole lot of music
there other than church music, singing groups. It’s not a crossroads
for popular culture. On occasion, there’ll be a street festival,
and that’s where you get to hear a lot of music. They still like
their big PA systems down there … In New Orleans and Jamaica
and these more out of the way places music is about celebration, and
they just kind of set it up any old place and start. You drive in
Jamaica, and somebody will just set up a PA on the roadside next to
a little coconut stand, and you go, “What is this about?”
and then at night people are dancing—it’s lovely. And the
same thing with the rural part of Louisiana, in the Cajun community.
The music actually has a function there. You know, you want to dance
on the weekend. So it serves the community. And that’s lovely.
It’s nice to see there are still pockets of that.
Figure 3. Rockin' Dopsie - JG: Would you play with these people,
like in Jamaica?
- DL: In New Orleans, I played with
a lot of bands there. In fact there was a great zydeco band—a
guy named Rockin’
Dopsie, though he’s not around anymore—and I used to
go and hear him at a little club called the Maple Leaf. I got to meet
him, and I invited him to play on Bob Dylan’s record, O Mercy.
- JG: I ask that because we can hear
that influence on some of the records that you made in New Orleans.
Your first solo album—one of the greatest things about it is
that it’s called Acadie and here you were absorbing Louisiana
culture, and in the album you hear these cultures trying to meet.
- DL: I suppose there was a retracement
of ancestral footsteps [on Acadie.] The Cajuns are originally
from Canada. I just felt some kind of an itch to go down there and
see what it was it was all about. And I was able to make some kind
of a musical connection between the Cajun community and myself. As
a record maker, I was interested in what the Neville Brothers were
up to, and trying to get into the neighborhoods there.
- JG: We’ve been talking a lot
about the influence of place on your music, yet there’s a tension
in your music between a sense of place and something that transcends
that sense of place. Your studio—wherever it is—is going
to have a sound that goes beyond where you are. You have this clear
fingerprint on what you do that people talk a lot about.
[DL is playing recordings of him playing pedal steel during the interview.]
- DL: Did you hear it on that steel
guitar just now?
- JG: Yes.
- DL: I don’t know what it is
or where it comes from, because these little steel guitar recordings—they
don’t have any production on them. It’s just a guitar. People
talk about my sound, but I’m just playing one instrument here—it’s
not much of a sound.
- JG: How can you not have any production?
If there’s a microphone, you’re choosing what microphone
to use …
- DL: Point being, that [recording] was essentially a documentation of playing that happened in the moment—it was a two-track recording. I suppose the thing that has served me best has been the ability to spot a little bit of something special at a given moment and say, OK that’s it right there. Let’s concentrate on what is glaringly special at the moment and make something out of it. And I still operate with that criteria. If I hear something that I think resonates true, then I just beam in on it and say, that’s it, and not try and incorporate too much.
Footnote
* Thank you to Caroline Sprinkel
and Tanya Merchant for their help with this interview.
Top
