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

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

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. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

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. Related Content Daniel Lanois Looks Back at His Work with Bob Dylan and U2 Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon Performs Entire Set of Bob Dylan Covers at Eaux Claires Fest Hear U2, Martin Garrix Team Up for Anthemic Single ‘Fireflies’ See Martin Garrix Debut New U2 Collaboration ‘Fireflies’ With the Edge at Tomorrowland

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 b...

Fights with Bob Dylan, Magic with U2: Daniel Lanois on His Life in Music — Rolling Stone | AIPROPX