Interview: Daniel Lanois

Daniel Lanois wears a lot of hats. Although the Canadian artist has an extensive discography of his own, he’s perhaps best known for his work as a producer, as he’s been behind the boards for albums from Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and Jon Hassell, just to name of few.

In the early ’80s, he also began working with Brian Eno, who was so impressed with Lanois’ talents that he invited him to co-produce U2’s 1984 LP The Unforgettable Fire. The partnership proved to be a successful one, as the two went on to co-produce several more U2 albums in the years ahead, including seminal efforts The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.

Still, while Lanois’ production efforts kept him busy – and won him a few Grammy awards in the process – he never stopped making music of his own. A skilled multi-instrumentalist, Lanois plays guitar, pedal steel and drums and has issued multiple albums over the years, many of them coming via the ANTI- label. His most recent full-length, 2014’s Flesh and Machine, is a fully instrumental outing that combines pedal steel with loose, arrhythmic drumming and a variety of digital and analogue sound processing devices.

In this excerpt from his recent interview with Frosty on RBMA Radio, Lanois talks about all of this and more.

How did you get introduced to playing and recording music?

When I was nine-years old, my mom would give me a dollar a week to go to the movies. I would walk a couple of miles to the movie house and enjoy my Saturday cinema – but, on this one Saturday, I saw a video in a music store window for this little, plastic recorder. It cost a dollar. On that day, I didn’t go to the cinema. I bought the recorder and played that thing until I made everyone in the building go crazy. I started inventing melodies and then my own a notation system, too, because I didn’t know how to read music. That was the beginning of composition for me. I’ve been a dedicated note-keeper ever since.

How did your folks support you in taking it further?

My mom was very pleased that I’d found something that I loved. As long as she heard me playing, she knew that I wasn’t out on the streets. One day, back in the days of door-to-door canvassing, a man knocked on my mom’s door and he said, “Do you have any kids that like music?” He was representing a music conservatory. She says, “Yeah, that one over there.” After I passed the aptitude test, he said to me, “We teach accordion and slide guitar,” and so once a week I would walk two miles downtown and past the cinema house to take the slide guitar lessons that my mom paid for. That was the beginning of a whole new way of looking at life.

Tell me about your first reaction to the sound of the slide guitar.

At first, I just played melodies on the slide guitar. My teacher played a regular strumming Spanish guitar, and we played classic American melodies like “Please come back, to the red river valley / Please come back, to a heart that is true.” The slide guitar was for the melody while the teacher played the chords. For me, it was a continuation of my penny whistle. The melodies just kept sinking into my head and I loved the fact that I could bend the notes. Because it’s not a fretted instrument, you get to use your ear differently.

At that time, were you connecting with a local music scene?

I always sang in the school choir, and it was my way to understand harmony. This was a very valuable turning point in my music journey because I was able to know that you need a base part for the melody to stand on, and then there’ll be harmony, and then maybe another support role. I had found a little recorder in a flea market that came with a microphone on speakers and a roller tape. I’d have my friends over: “Okay, let’s see some recording,” wind it back and played it. It was only a mono recording, but I started balancing the room according to what I was hearing with the view of then making improvements. I kept buying more equipment until I had a full recording studio happening in my mother’s house.

You were coming to this intuitively, right?

Yeah. I never worked in a recording studio and I never studied recording at school. I learned by trial and error. I acquired a Sony, TC-630 and it had a curious function: you could record one part of performance, push the on sound button, and the recording would transfer to the second channel; a two-channel machine with some new overdubs. Then you could bounce back to the first channel with more overdubs.

The interesting thing was that the first recording would degenerate a little bit to the second pass, and then degenerated again to the next stage. I had to plan my recordings in such a way that in anticipation of degradation. It was okay for things to go a little foggy as long as I knew they were going to be foggy – and then the new toppings were more high fidelity and audible. It was an interesting byproduct of depth. That was the beginning of multi-tracking for me.

What were you, at that moment, sonically challenging? Was it stuff that you guys were just jamming and recording?

I always had a few compositions on the go with little instrumentals because I was not a songwriter then as a kid. I had a little beat box, a couple of synthesizers and an arsenal of curious instruments. I made my own recordings but I also recorded other people, and I got pretty good at it. Then, we’re starting getting around that I had a little scene happening in my mom’s basement, and I was able to come up with some pretty good results.

Shortly after, I hooked up with a Christian music association in Canada. They brought in gospel quartets from all over the world and one of the touring stops was my mom’s basement. We would make gospel quartet records in two days. I was business-minded as a kid and I offered a package of one thousand pieces of vinyl – artwork included, with full recording and mastering – and would deliver the records to this organization.

Was the first record that you produced for a gospel quartet?

I never thought of myself as a producer. I was just a guy making records and I had a connection with a pressing plant in Toronto. I was really happy to provide a service. I recorded dozens of gospel quarter records and, with quartets, it was a continuation of what I’d learned from the choir. I was able to help these people should they bump into a problem choosing a harmony. Then eventually, somebody called me a record producer.

Did you have clarity of what this meant within this music world?

The recording studio ran in tandem with my guitar playing. I played guitar for various bands in Canada and for backing singers. I kept my recording studio running all the time so that whatever money I made from live performance, I would use to buy more equipment. My mom was very poor – she was a hairdresser with four kids – but if there was a chance to suck away $100, that would buy a microphone, and so on.

How long did you have the space there?

The studio in my mother’s house was there for 10 years. There was something very sweet about it. My mom was a big supporter and she was really excited that we’re doing something. At that point, I was in business with my brother Bob. The word had gotten out about us and we started getting some more serious, with more pop people coming in to record. Rick James did some demos in my mom’s basement in the early ‘70s because the organ player that I worked with a lot, Eddie Roth, knew Rick and then said he should make a record there.

My mom would be baking eggs for Rick James while we were recording. This was a real turning point for me because Rick played all of his instruments. He’s a great drummer, bass player – a real multi-instrumentalist. In a matter of 20 minutes, Rick would have this full track pouring out of the speakers and it really shook me. The recordings were never released, though. I can’t remember hearing those songs anywhere, ultimately.

We bought a building in Hamilton, which is about an hour from Buffalo on the Canadian side of the border. Since my brother was a great builder, he built the studio into a very nice facility as I kept working in the basement until [the new studio] was ready to move into. Then we moved to 16 tracks and started getting a lot of business from Toronto, which was another hour away: from folk musicians, more cutting edge experimental musicians and pop artists. I recorded three albums with Martha and the Muffins in that studio when my sister was their bass player, which marked the beginning of bigger, more visibly pop productions.

There was a large Jamaican expat scene in Toronto then. Was that how you got connected to dub sounds?

I’d recorded Jamaican bands in my mom’s basement back then and the word got out, but I wasn’t going after dub as a genre. People just showed up and I recorded them. I appreciated that it was soul music – if we could use soul music as a broad term for music that comes out of people and rings through. I supposed that was the beginning of the more experimental side of things because the Jamaicans were using echo machines.

I was also working with a very talented producer named Billy Bryans who was bringing in some very far-out projects. I would try to surprise him with things that I thought he would like. It was through him and two women called the Time Twins that I met Brian Eno. The twins have gone to New York and played Brian some of the recordings we worked on. He liked what he heard and they said, “There’s a kid in Canada that we made them with.” He called out of the blue and asked if I would record him.

Were you familiar with his work prior?

I never heard of Brian Eno prior to his call. In fact, because he was from out of town, I said to my brother, “Make sure we get some cash upfront because I don’t know who he is.” Eno requested that we have a very nice synthesizer called Yamaha CS-80. When he walked in (with the cash) he’d already had tapes that he’d done with Harold Budd in New York. We transferred the quarter-inch tapes to my multi-track and Brian proceeded to add processing to the raw piano recordings. This all led to a record called The Plateaux of Mirror.

That’s when it started to get fascinating to me because our work process was very effects-based. Effects were recorded during the performance, not added during mixing time. At any given moment, we set up the console in a way that meant that the effects were listened to through two tracks, ready to record. If something seemed to be resonating, all we had to do was press record and we’d got all the sound effects printed on the multi-track.

Having printed two tracks of really nice echoes, or whatever we were doing, I’d patch all of the effects to other tracks. The two original tracks of effects were treated like overdubs on the two isolated tracks. Often, the next generation or even the generation after that would be the more interesting one, allowing us to abandon the first couple. It got really far out.

I got completely hooked on Eno’s technique, and the fact that he was dedicated to this direction. Prior to meeting him, I was recording a lot of different projects. After meeting him, I thought, “this is really the business here.” He was operating outside the confines of commerciality and doing something really beautiful. I thought this was a smart man who has embraced a philosophy that I want to belong to, and I never looked back.

The first record that you guys worked on was The Plateaux of Mirror. Then, where did Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks fall into that? That was around ‘84, I think.

We did another record one called The Pearl, which was recorded in its entirety in my studio and Harold came to Canada to play the piano parts for. At that point, we had expanded our palette and had a very nice Fender Rhodes piano for Harold to play. He jockeyed from the acoustic grand piano to the Fender Rhodes and, at that point, I was the watchdog for performance. A little bit of chopping went on with the razorblade, but we used the same technique with the effects [as we did with Brian Eno]. I never wait for a mixing day to get back to the sound. If we’re lucky enough to have a sound on the day, it gets printed.

What were the effects, up close?

I’ve only ever used a few boxes of effects – maybe three or four boxes at a given time. That has changed over the years depending on availability of new equipment and so on, but quite early on, I realized that it’s best to be a master of a few things rather than having a lot of boxes that you don’t know how to get in and out of. I always had a ‘70s harmonizer with delay and VCO, and a VAMS harmonizer. I still use it today: VCL, voltage control isolators device, it’s important to me. For those who don’t know what that sounds, it’s like a voice that’s “Hah.” It puts a bit of a wobble and a peak shift into the mix, which is I used to hear my grandmother sing in the sink as she did the dishes: “Hah-hah-hum.” I thought that’s what a VCO is all about. I use a more complex setup now, but the philosophy is still the same.

From the time that you started to work with Eno on multiple projects: was this the main focus of what you were doing musically, or were you still producing and recording a lot of other music on the side?

I recorded a record with Eno called Apollo, which was born of an invitation to provide a soundtrack to the documentary of the same name by the Apollo space missions. Brian had discovered this little toy instrument called the Suzuki Omni chord – you could think of it as an electronic harp. It mimics strings and has a little built-in bass element: almost one-stop instrument that provides a whole sound of an entire band. We found that by recording this thing and slowing it down, we were able to get this very beautiful, deep, jukebox sound. Brian came up with this little groove. It ultimately became a track called “Deep Blue Day.” It’s the “bom-dru-fum-fum-fum,” almost like a slow tangle of sorts.

Some of the astronauts for the Apollo space missions were from Texas, who grew up with country music and had twangy voices. The country angle of the documentary sparked an idea in me: I played a little bit of a country pass on steel guitar on what was to be “Deep Blue Day” and Brian fell in love with it, so that was the beginning of my playing with Brian. His brother, Roger, came in to help us out as well. We had a lot of fun making Apollo. To this day, it’s a real beauty and a reference point for other ambient musicians.

Were you watching clips of the film as you were playing, or were you just given the theme of what was going on?

We were not watching the film particularly. I think Brian had a few clips, but we were just operating in the spirit of the project rather than scoring to details.

The director of the film told me that when he first went to Brian Eno’s loft in New York, Eno was in an anechoic chamber that smelled of aromatherapy, because he was trying to match music and aroma. Did you have any rituals or processes in the studio with him?

While we were making Apollo, and other ambient records, Brian lived in my house. It seemed like a good idea: we could take mixes home at night, evaluate them, and then go back the next morning. We developed this friendship that was a bit unusual – that you might not see in the usual record-making process. We’d work on a track for, let’s say, a day. Then we’d make what we called a “film mix,” which was an excuse to go further: maybe slowing it down more, being more radical with our blends, and so on. Sure enough, the radical mixes were always the favorite mixes when we got back to the house. Even though the music was pretty far out to begin with, the challenge to go to yet another dimension was part of our technique. We started accepting this as just a way of working.

The spirit of it was really this friendship but I took on no other work while I was working with Brian and that was it. I got an 8:00 session, and the type of usual behavior that happens in recording studios, people are so busy that they never get a chance to sync into something to that degree. I decided, “Okay, this is so special. As a sign of respect, I will never look at my watch, never pick up the phone, and never talk about other work.”

Are there vibrations with Brian that you’d like to reflect on – those energizing moments?

I appreciated that Eno included me in the creative process: that he encouraged me to perform on the graphic equalizer as he was performing on the synthesizer, which gave the performance an ebb and flow; a sonic ebb and flow, not an aestheticized synthesizer sound. I’ve realized the importance of putting a sonic character into the recording, not to just record something flat with the view of making it more interesting later. To make it interesting on the spot, be it by printing your sound effects or working a graphic equalizer as somebody is performing. When people are involved, they do better work. I don’t want somebody playing end ball down the hall or making phone calls. Please, get them in the room and maximize their potential.

Do you see a difference between the role, for yourself, as an artist or producer?

When I first started producing records formally, my job was very much that of providing advice and doing the best recordings we could, to have the best fidelity. But the more I did that, the more I realized that the advantage that I had was that I was a musician, too. Playing along with bands that I was producing became useful. When Eno and I were producing U2 records, Eno had his little station set up and with his effects and his keyboards, and I had something similar with my percussion and my guitar and a little bag of tricks.

This allowed us to get familiar with the music and have a better understanding of the arrangements. That’s a technique that I’ve been using all along. When people work with me, they understand I’m not just an enthusiast of music. I am a player, a pretty good singer, and I have a good education in harmony. Eno is a great singer, too: we sang harmonies on U2 records with The Edge rather than bringing in backing singers, to realize who is in the room and maximize their potential.

What is important to you those first steps when you’re working or collaborating with someone?

A philosophical exchange is always a part of the formula when working with people, but there’s something else that has always existed with me. I’ve always done experimentations outside of formal record production. In Canada, our old town library had become available because the library moved and the building they vacate was a beautiful, vast edifice, built in the ‘30s. It became available to me as a sandbox experimentation place for my sonics. I recorded some bands in the old library, which allowed me to have an understanding of the sound of corridors, mezzanines, bathrooms, closets, vaults and big open rooms.

I got to experiment with interesting micing: something further back, something a little closer. I just did this through my own curiosity about how different rooms could sound. Then, the invitation came to record The Unforgettable Fire with U2 in Ireland, in an unusual location with a vast array of rooms, so I came in with some experience. It’s happened a good few times, perhaps by synchronicity: that someone who has a similar thought to something that I was excited about comes to me, and we can put it all into practice.

Where was The Unforgettable Fire recorded?

The set-up for The Unforgettable Fire was initially located in Slane Castle, Ireland. It’s on the River Boyne where the Battle of Boyne was fought, and that was a deciding battle that when England took control of Ireland. The most massive room is the room that we chose to set up, but it turned out to be too speedy and reverberant. Anything tight and fast was too wishy-washy, so we moved to the library, which was a rectangular room: very tall and full of books. It was dense. They had a good punch to it. This was a really big lesson for me, and a great lesson for anyone who’s interested in soundproofing a room and they don’t have any money. Just get a bunch of old magazines and books that people are throwing out and put up some shelves, and you’re going to have a great sound.

Is there a song in that record that you found interesting or innovative way to record, or something that you have a great challenge?

We decided that we needed an intimate environment to work on the lyrics – to do vocal overdubs, harmonies and come up with bass ideas. We always had two setups. The library setup, which I’ll call the live room, and then the more intimate set up, the control room, with couches where people can sit with vocal microphones. You could then have a combination: bash it out on the band room, or intellectualize and get more specific about harmonies, and so on. The control room allowed songs like “MLK”: “Sleep tonight, sleep.” It was a very beautiful, local sound on Bono. I used a Sony C500 microphone, for those technical people out there. It’s hard to find these days because they’re all broken, but I had a brand new one and it has a very silky top end.

When you guys were doing The Unforgettable Fire, were you and Brian talking first amongst yourself or was this a group conversation?

People like excitement and surprises. Whether you’re working in a castle, a warehouse, or wherever you decide it to be, I think that if you’ve customized the environment to the project itself, then that is another level of commitment that people feel. If you do a setup that’s specific to the record you’re working on, and you don’t have to dismantle it by 5PM for the other session, then you’re really building a custom sound for that record.

In the broad picture of music, what do you most want to bring to in the world?

I feel a responsibility to do that for an artist if I take on some work. I felt that way when I went to work with Bob Dylan. Bob had fallen out of favor a little bit through the ‘80s, and I got to work with him in around ‘87-’88. Bob is a national treasure in the States, and so for the Canadian kid to come in and do something special really meant a lot. The criteria is always about doing something as special as possible – to build a “masterpiece,” if we can use that term. Part of building a masterpiece is to do something that has not been done before.

Was someone like Dylan who is so iconic and you mentioned you may have fallen out of favor, you guys are focused on making something new. Was Time Out of Mind the first record?

I recorded two Dylan records: Oh Mercy in ‘87-88 and Time Out of Mind in ‘97. I wanted to make a record with Bob whereby he would occupy the center of the picture. We cut most of the record to our roll in 808. I had the 808 to an electro-voice stage monitor, and I have an EV 15-inch stage monitor. I sat and played a pick-up on the acoustic guitar and Bob would play either acoustic or electric, but I didn’t want to mic the acoustic guitar because I didn’t want the vocals to bleed into the instrument.

We had pickups on our acoustic guitars and some little amps just a few feet away, with a bunch of cushions surrounding them. This allowed us to record the guitars without vocal bleeding into the guitar amp, because I knew that Bob might want to jack a few lyrics around or punch in something. It meant a lot to me that Bob’s vocal sound and diction would sound really great, and occupy the that center. I feel a responsibility to take listeners on a journey. I feel that I achieved that with him.