Fights with Bob Dylan, Magic with U2: Daniel Lanois on His Life in Music

It’s easy to associate Daniel Lanois with a distinct sonic approach shared by many of the classic albums he helped birth, from Emmylou Harris‘ Wrecking Ball to Bob Dylan‘s Time Out of Mind. The Canadian producer/musician creates songs that feel like they’re haunted by their own ghosts, laced with intertwining echoes, tiny sonic fractures, and a palpable sense of place. But in the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Lanois says his job is much bigger than that. “People talk about the sound, but what about the soul?” he says. “The sound of a record, well, that’s a given… But how about the soul of a record? Sound is my thing. But that’s not the main thing that I bring to the table.”

Lanois’ new solo album, Belladonna Nocturne, is a trippy collection of instrumentals that lean hard on his gift for atmosphere, from the Spanish-guitar-propelled “Inside the Walls of Puebla” to the wild, chopped-up feedback excursions of “Warp Sustain.” In our interview, he talked about creating that album and looked back on his work with U2, Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan, D’Angelo, the Neville Brothers, and Neil Young. To hear the podcast version,  check out Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.

What are you up to right now?I just came off of this tour in Texas with Micah Nelson, Willie’s son. We’ve made an [upcoming] album called The Ocean Floor, under the name Particle / Lanois. And we were invited to be on the bill with the Outlaw Tour people, which included Willie’s Fourth of July picnic. We had a nice time. And now, after the whirlwind of that, I’m getting ready to go to Canada to do some touring up there, which bumps into Scandinavia. 

Let’s start with Belladonna Nocturne. It has a real sense of place that changes from track to track. Explain how this all came together.I see every song as a scene. I have one, “At the Foot of the Skyway Bridge,” which is a bridge where I grew up in Hamilton, [Ontario,] which is not too far from Buffalo. It’s a steel town. And the Skyway Bridge is a place that I would ride to with my motorcycle-riding buddies, and it all had a little bit of rock & roll in it, old-timey, as if a throwback to the Fifties, let’s say. It’s a place that I like to go to, to cleanse the palate and remind myself of who I am and where I grew up. And it will likely build another picture for somebody else. We like to transport the listener to a location.

“Steel Mill” is definitely a vibe.“Steel Mill” paints a picture of more of an urban landscape and has Jermaine Holmes on the drums, and he comes from the hip-hop world. I met him through D’Angelo. His backbeat is what we call a cross-stick. It’s not a lot of sound. It’s just a very clear striking point, and it means that it leaves more room, more air in the picture for other sounds to come through. It’s basically just three instruments. It’s bass, drums, and steel guitar. I just kept adding what I call my dubs to it, and any orchestral tones that one hears in there, l built through my electronic process of dubbing.

Your process is that you sample from the song itself and then build additional material into the song using those samples.Yeah, that’s the process that got used on this track. I just sample from the steel guitar in this case and then expand upon it. You could call them unknown sounds, because you hear them and you wouldn’t say, “Oh yeah, that’s a flute,” and something else is a euphonium. No, they’re more mysterious than that. The reason that it works for me is I’m just drawing from already existing source material. I’m not adding a new sound. So there’s a reassurance that it’s cut from the same cloth.

You recorded “Unshaken” with D’Angelo for the soundtrack to Red Dead Redemption 2. What were the extent of your collaborations with him?I met D’Angelo quite early on in the Red Dead Redemption music making. I met him at the Rockstar Games office in Manhattan. We hit it off nicely, and I played him a track that I had at the time. It’s a 6/8 rock song that he loved, and he said he would be happy to work on that with me. And that track did not pan out. He worked on it for a couple of days. He said, “Dan, I’m not really getting anywhere with this.” And I said, “Well, D, we’re here to have a good time and get to a special place. Give me a chance. Give me a day, and I’ll come up with another track.” And I built a new track for him. We already had one line that was used on the soundtrack. And that line, “May I stand unshaken amidst the crash of worlds,” which is something we had recorded in New Orleans — it was written by Rocco DeLuca, that line. And I took that line to D’Angelo, but I wrote then the 30 other lines to the song.

Did you guys stay in touch?We did keep in touch. Only so much. We talked about doing some more work together and, you know, he came up as a church man, and I came up through church and worked quite a bit with church folks, including Brian Blade and his family in Shreveport, Louisiana. D was very touched by my having worked with the Neville Brothers. He was a fan of the Neville Brothers, and they always were a point of reference for him, for magnificent work done in the South by the Meters and so on. And so I think there was an underlying respect there that we were both in this for the right reasons.

I was just listening to “Ballad of Hollis Brown” that you did with the Neville Brothers. It was one of the two songs that you played to Bob Dylan right before you did Oh Mercy with him. I think it’s one of the best Dylan covers ever recorded.Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for bringing that up. That was a little bit of a test track that we did with the Nevilles. I didn’t have a studio set up very well in New Orleans yet. I had a little apartment, and they showed up at the apartment, and we knocked out that version of “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” I just had a 12-track Akai at the time and I mixed it on a little Sony cassette machine, my little shoulder-strap Sony machine. And I never bettered the mix. I didn’t tell anybody, but we just took the cassette and mastered from that because it had the vibe on it. You never know how are you gonna get ’em, in regards to technology. Would anybody ever recommend a 12-track Akai mixed to cassette? But I never had any complaints.

To go back to Belladonna Nocturne — was this recorded in a bunch of different places? What was the process there?It pretty much a grab-bag of beginnings, let’s call them. I have a studio in Los Angeles with a very nice piano, a nice Steinway piano, and then I have the same thing in Toronto. So wherever I happen to be, if the inspiration comes to me, then I go to the piano. It was not a sit down and let’s make an album in three weeks [situation]. It was a collection of inspirations from along the way.

Tell me about “Canadian National.”That was recorded in Toronto on my little Steinway O. I laminated every hammer with additional felt, so the piano has a little softer touch, you might say, closer to a Fender Rhodes. Which allows me to crank up my mic pre[amp], and then I get to hear more aftereffect. We call that the harmonics. And I’m only so much of a piano player, but I’m very good with a razor blade. Having decided on a mode, let’s say, I would improvise within that mode. And if I was lucky enough to get an eight-bar section that I fall in love with, then I look to connect that eight bars to another eight bars further on down the line. Glenn Gould used to work that way, one phrase at a time, and then chop it together with a razor blade. So thanks, Glenn.

Your friend Brian Eno once showed me that he keeps all these starts to songs, little four-second sonic landscapes that sometimes become something and sometimes don’t. Do you do something similar?We all collect our seeds, let’s call them. I have a lot of them that I love. They’re not finished works by any means, but it might be something to a melody that I wanna get back to at some point. So we keep a stockpile of our seeds. I used to call it the melody orphanage. Songs-to-be, but haven’t found a home yet. I think it’s interesting to revisit old seeds. They obviously got put in the orphanage for a reason. There’s something special about them, and they might just be looking for a family.