Q&A: Daniel Lanois
Life, Daniel Lanois believes, is a series of peaks and valleys, the peaks being those times when “you get lost in your work and you love it and you can’t think of anything else.” And for Lanois the last two years have been marked by a remarkable string of peaks. During that time he’s coproduced three of the most important and influential albums of the Eighties: U2’s Joshua Tree (with Brian Eno), Peter Gabriel’s So (with Gabriel) and former Band leader Robbie Robertson’s debut solo album (with Robertson). If those records haven’t made Lanois a household name, they’ve certainly established him as the hot producer.
“As you can well imagine, when you’ve got a few records that are doing all right, you get a lot of calls, and it’s hard to say no,” Lanois says as he sits in the London office he shares with Eno, a frequent collaborator. “But,” he adds, “I’ve learned to say no in the last few months.”
Lanois’s success did not come about overnight. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1951 to French Canadian parents, he was exposed to music from an early age. His father and grandfather played fiddle, his mother sang, and when his family got together, “the old guys would start tap-dancing to these jigs.” One Christmas his mother gave him a recorder, and before long he graduated to steel guitar. “I didn’t like it very much,” he says of the guitar, which he had to hold on his lap. “I kept asking the teacher, ‘When do I get to hold it like Elvis?’ ”
Only eleven years old, Lanois was already hooked on music. Not knowing how to read music, he made up his own notation system. “I had to invent a system of little dots and spacing,” Lanois remembers. “It looked a bit like written music — but a little more homemade.”
Around that time, Lanois’s parents split up, and his mother moved the kids to the outskirts of Hamilton, Ontario, a predominantly English-speaking area. “So there I was — a French kid,” Lanois says. “I didn’t speak a word of English. Maybe that’s why I latched on to the music.” By the time he graduated from high school, Lanois had mastered both the English language and the guitar, and he had started crisscrossing Canada, playing with just about any band that needed a guitarist. He eventually found work backing up fairly established artists, like Sylvia Tyson, of the folk duo Ian and Sylvia, and he started doing studio work. In 1970, Lanois set up a studio in the basement of his mother’s house — a shoestring operation that Lanois likens to “a little corner store”: “I was engineering, bookkeeping, running to Toronto to pick up stock.”
By the late Seventies, though, Lanois had outgrown the studio, and he and his brother Bob opened Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton in 1980. There they built a reputation north of the border for their work with such Canadian groups as Martha and the Muffins (which included Lanois’s sister Jocelyn) and the Parachute Club. Meanwhile, down in New York, a demo tape Lanois had made for a Toronto group called the Time Twins attracted the attention of Eno, the avant-garde studio wiz who had most recently been busy recording a series of stark, atmospheric instrumental works he labeled Ambient Music.
Eno arrived in Hamilton with a batch of tapes he’d made with minimalist piano player Harold Budd. “They had a bit of hiss on them, and I thought, ‘I don’t know-why don’t you go back and re-record them?’ ” says Lanois, who admits he “didn’t know Eno from Adam.” That album, The Plateaux of Mirror, became the first of several albums of Ambient Music recorded at Grant Avenue. “I just got into that pace,” Lanois says. “Really quiet and atmospheric music that paints a very strong picture with slow detail — almost like musical landscapes.”
Then, in 1984, U2 approached Eno about producing The Unforgettable Fire, and Eno asked Lanois to coproduce. That record was followed by Lanois’s first outing with Gabriel, the soundtrack of the film Birdy.
Now, in the wake of the success of So, The Joshua Tree and Robbie Robertson, Lanois is starting to work on his own solo album. “I’ve chosen to set some time aside for myself,” he explains. “I think it would be foolish to just carry on working. You run out of ideas, and running out of ideas is a big mistake. Then you’re just sort of doing the job because you think it’s a job. And at that point you might as well just be working in a lab somewhere.”
As a producer, how involved do you get in the actual creation of the music? For example, would you tell Bono that a certain lyric isn’t working?
In the case of Bono, I’ll get fairly involved. He generally writes more lyrics than he needs, so he’ll have an idea of what he wants to do with a song, and he’ll walk in with half a dozen pages of verses. So the thing that is helpful is if you can say, “Well, you’ve got this idea and that idea. Maybe you’ve got two separate songs here. Therefore, let’s put that over here and concentrate on this idea and focus on making this bit of it work.”
He needs somebody like that. Edge has been helpful, and Adam [Clayton] occasionally steps in and offers suggestions. If those people aren’t around, I take that role, or Brian [Eno] will.
Q&A: Daniel Lanois, Page 1 of 3