“I want to make music that will take people to another place beyond their understanding,” Daniel Lanois says, “for them to feel that a record will be a reliable transporter.” He’s talking about Belladonna Nocturne, his gorgeous new instrumental album, where each track is a unique, nearly tactile soundscape. But he’s always applied applied that same philosophy to his work as a producer of world-shaking albums, including U2‘s The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, Peter Gabriel‘s So, and Bob Dylan‘s Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind.
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Lanois goes deep on the making of his new album, along with his collaborations with Dylan, Gabriel, U2, Neil Young, and D’Angelo, and much more. To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Here are some highlights from the discussion:
Lanois thinks Jimi Hendrix would want to know how he made the new album’s “Warp Sustain.” “That’s a dive bomb performance on a pedal-steel guitar,” he says. “As I hear it now, I think it’s the deepest and most yearning piece on the record. I recorded it and put it away for a while, and when I got back to it, I thought, ‘Wow, this thing is really rocking, and the emotion is very deep.’ And it’s a singular instrument with lots of processing. If I could align myself with Jimi Hendrix for a second, I think that Jimi might say, ‘Way to go, Danny. How’d you make that one?’”
One of D’Angelo’s final releases, 2018’s “Unshaken,” from the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack, came together with Lanois after the singer rejected another track. “I met him at the Rockstar Games office in Manhattan,” Lanois recalls. “And 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. So that’s what we initially went to do together. 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.’ So I said, ‘Give me a day, and I’ll come up with another track.’ And I built a new track for him… D was very touched by my having worked with the Neville Brothers. He was a fan of the Neville Brothers.”
Lanois still hangs out with Billy Bob Thornton, who enlisted him to score 1996’s Sling Blade. “What was special about Sling Blade was the one-on-one relationship I had with Billy,” says Lanois. “I don’t remember there being a lot of opinions going around or music supervisors and all that kind of stuff. I just saw Billy last week in Texas, and we sat on a little porch together, and it might as well have been a Diane Arbus photograph. Couple of lost misfits on a back porch philosophizing about this and that and the other thing. It was pretty great. Time stands still with Billy. That’s what I like about him.”
In Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles, he writes that Lanois smashed a dobro during the Oh Mercy sessions — the producer explains why.“It was simply about, I wanted to keep pushing for the private part of the record,” says Lanois, who recalls that Dylan wanted to get more outside players involved. “Bob was playing a great part on his guitar that I wanted him to finish. And he thought it would be better if we got somebody else. I said, ‘No, we’re not gonna get somebody else. We’re gonna get the man himself, Bob Dylan, to play the part.’ So that’s it. By Dobro or otherwise.”
Lanois partially blames himself for “Series of Dreams” getting left off Oh Mercy. “The only regret I have on that album is we excluded one of my favorite tracks, which was ‘Series of Dreams,’” he says. “I have to take some responsibility with that. You know, I think I did say to Bob that it was reminiscent of things I had done for other people on other records. And the part of me that likes works to be completely original cast a shadow of doubt on it, and he might have listened to that, and so I should have gaffered my face, and I didn’t.”
Lanois isn’t happy about the 2023 remixes of Time Out of Mind that removed much of the 1997 album’s signature sound. “I got a call from Wim Wenders when that came out ’cause I hadn’t listened to it yet,” he says. “And he said, ‘Daniel, I’ve gone back to listening to the original of that record because I couldn’t even listen to these remixes ’cause the feeling was not there.’… I can only assume that this happened after Bob sold his catalog and whatnot, and those folks were probably looking to make a few bucks back and decided let’s do a remix.” He adds that the people involved “might’ve done well to take a look in the mirror and say, ‘Well, I don’t think I bettered it.’ And that might’ve been the most courageous thing to do, just to say, ‘Lanois got it right,’ and leave well enough alone, and it’s a masterpiece, and let’s throw confetti and bust out the rum.”
Peter Gabriel’s So was made in a cow barn. “We worked together for a year almost to the day, which was apparently a fast pace for Peter,” Lanois says. “And I loved him like a brother, and it was very much a one-on-one. David Rhodes lived around the corner — Peter’s guitar player. So it was largely Peter and myself, and then David Rhodes would come over, and then we were the Three Stooges. We had a good time. We wore hard hats to work, and it was a very nice vibe. And this place was right out in the middle of the country, and we were in a cow barn. And it’s not a glamorous studio by any means, and I was OK with that. And we put the glamour in the music rather than the curtains.”
The philosophy that helped create U2’s Achtung Baby was simple. “You got [Brian] Eno, me, Flood, and all we ever cared about is soul and originality,” says Lanois. “What can we do that’s never been heard before?”
Lanois has a theory about why Dylan is wearing a hoodie every night onstage on his current tour. “Maybe he doesn’t like his hair right now,” he says with a laugh. “You know, I’m doing the beanie, he’s doing the hoodie.”
