LANOIS KEEPS HIS EARS OPEN
The famed artist and producer lets the sound come to him.
“It means a lot to me as a sonic innovator
to try and break some new ground.”
DANIEL LANOIS
For Daniel Lanois, producing Emmylou Harris’s masterpiece Wrecking Ball was not as risky a venture as one might think.
The daring nature of the 1995 Grammy-winning recording became clearer than ever with its reissue this spring in a beefed-up, remastered three-disc version, featuring outtakes and a DVD documentary. As a celebration of its rerelease, Harris and Lanois have recently performed the entire album on her tour. (Harris will also appear as a guest during Lanois’s concert at the Montreal International Jazz Festival on Thursday.)
While the impossible-to-pigeonhole Wrecking Ball was an unpredictable move for Harris, a country artist, the notion of taking a chance was not uppermost in the minds of the collaborators involved, Lanois said during a recent telephone interview.
“Perhaps by country music standards and expectations, it might be viewed as a departure or something fresh,” he acknowledged. “(But) we try and make classics. We don’t try and serve anything other than our own parts. Of course, you want to serve an artist the best you can, as a record maker, but I was not operating by any preconceptions.”
The Hull-born Lanois was ready to sign on after a visit to Harris’s home. “I felt a certain kind of American strength in her house — an oldfashioned dignity that touched me. I thought the time was right for me to serve such an artist,” he said.
Lanois told Harris at the outset that the sentiment and foundation country music stands on are not found only in Nashville, but belong to everyone. To illustrate his point, he said, he played Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing and May This Be Love for her. The latter was chosen to be recorded for the album.
“We did a duet and just went from that. And I discovered a sound along the way,” he said, referring to the mandolin, piano and 12-string acoustic combination that was beginning to define the core of the playing. “You want a record to be unique, sonically. It means a lot to me as a sonic innovator to try and break some new ground. I also found by huddling the musicians up right close together and doing live vocals with Emmy, we started to have this magic.”
The expansive sound of the 1995 recording, with all its breathing space, virtually demands to be heard through large speakers that will allow the room to fill up with the album’s ghosts. But Lanois is not bothered by trends that suggest many will download an MP3 version and hear it through cheap earbuds.
“It’s a matter of convenience, but at the same time there’s an entire revolution now in fidelity. You couldn’t get high-grade headphones so easily eight years ago,” he said. “And there’s a vinyl resurgence. I think running in tandem with convenience is an awful lot of dedication to quality.”
If the type of artist-producer collaboration heard on discs like Wrecking Ball seems to some like part of a vanished era, Lanois argued that everything is cyclical.
“Some very talented young producers work almost exclusively with machines and write songs for them to be hits. And I have to admire the specifics of their vision,” he said. “I’m not interested in doing it myself, but it’s probably kind of a return to the Brill Building back in the day.
“We were afforded that incredible chapter of experimentation in the ’70s, following the Beatles and Pet Sounds, when bands like Led Zeppelin didn’t have hits. They just made albums everybody wanted to hear. We were standing on the bedrock of hits that had happened in the ’50s and ’60s, including the Motown hits,” he said. “I think as the pendulum swings, people are having pop-song hits, and it will probably open up another window of appetites and therefore opportunity. It won’t be Sgt. Pepper’s. It will be something else, but it will serve that part of us that wants to investigate the mysterious aspects of life through artistry.”
As for the more immediate future, Lanois expects to release an instrumental steel-guitar album, with the possible title Forest City, in the fall. But the fate of some work he did with Robert Plant, put on ice in 2010, remains unknown.
“It’s really fantastic,” he said. “Two of the songs, I think, are great singles.” An attempt to convince Plant to release the tracks and follow up with an album, if warranted, has yet to yield a green light from the singer. “He said, ‘OK, let me think about that.’ So he’s still thinking about it,” Lanois said, laughing. “Hey, man. It’s something we have on the back burner. Call him up and twist his arm!”
As for the next U2 album, it will be among the few with no involvement on his part. Lanois did, however, give Bono a musical present at the singer’s birthday party in Los Angeles last month when he played Sonho Dourado on steel guitar for his old friend. “It’s like a little Celtic, Irish melody I wrote years ago that keeps coming back to me. It really resonated in the night. He was very touched by it,” Lanois said.
In spite of the motorcycle accident that sidelined him four years ago, Lanois was about to pick up his Harley-Davidson Duo-Glide and ride from Hamilton to Toronto, where a tribute concert was being staged in his honour at the Luminato Festival.
But accolades seem somewhat beside the point for him.
“My only responsibility to music — and everything I’ve built, for myself and for other people — is to keep making it as good as I can and try to be excellent again, if possible,” he said. “I thank God that I can wake up in the morning and be excited about my work — and ideas come to me. As long as I have that, I’m bulletproof.”