Very good recent interview by Paul Tingen, lots of information on Belladonna:
http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_house_soul/House of Soul
By Paul Tingen
Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM
Daniel Lanois is an enigma with a long and interesting history. The 54-year-old Canadian has produced a staggering list of classic recordings from artists such as Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Peter Gabriel, Willie Nelson, and U2 (see the sidebar “Daniel Lanois: A Selected Discography”). These productions are high on grit and atmospherics, short on bombast and high-tech gloss, and have earned Lanois much critical praise. Rolling Stone called him “the most important record producer to emerge in the '80s.”
Since the release of his first album, the introverted and lyrical Acadie (Warner Brothers, 1989), Lanois has also conducted a highly respected solo career. Acadie is widely regarded as a masterpiece, but its successor, For the Beauty of Wynona (Warner Brothers, 1993), is more uneven and was followed by a decade-long hiatus on the solo front. Nevertheless, Lanois is one of those rare musicians who have had a career filled with commercial and critical success.
More recently, however, there were indications that all was not well in Lanois's world. For example, his steady stream of productions had almost dried up. Since his most recent major U2 project, All That You Can't Leave Behind (Uni/Interscope, 2000), all he had produced was Harold Budd's La Bella Vista (Shout Factory, 2003).
In 2000, he sold his legendary Kingsway studio in New Orleans. It was located in a 19th-century house full of high ceilings and carpets. The studio exemplified the two production approaches for which Lanois has become best known: recording in unusual, atmospheric locations, and recording without a separate control room.
Around that same time, Lanois began to lead a more nomadic lifestyle, moving to a small village on the west coast of Mexico called Todos Santos. After a year, he packed up and headed for Oxnard, north of Los Angeles, where he set up shop in an old Mexican cinema called El Teatro. Before long, he relocated again, to Silver Lake, California, where he set up his current studio.
Lanois also created a second private recording facility in Toronto. Those changes occurred along with the rekindling of his solo career. He has gone on several live tours in the past two years and has released three albums — Shine (ANTI, 2003), Rockets (daniellanois.com, 2004), and Belladonna (ANTI, 2005). Although this wealth of activity is a sign of an artist on a creative roll, the sense of melancholy that dominates his recent records is unsettling.
“I kind of went to a bad place emotionally,” admits Lanois. “I dropped out of sight for a while. I have been in the machine since I was a kid. That's fine as long as you have your nose to the grindstone, but I have taken a lot of punches [laughs], and I am not taking it anymore. I got sick of the business; it felt like quicksand. So if I see hypocrisy walk through the door, I just turn away.
“I have become a lot more spiritual about the whole thing. I just follow my musical instincts — my heart — these days. And I don't have the itch right now to produce other people's albums, so I am not going to do it. I'm happy to be working on my own music. The melancholy that you hear is there, but it has always been in my work. I have just surrendered to the fact that I am who I am, and I do what I do.”
Sound Laboratory
Lanois has always been on a journey of inner healing and rediscovery and is known as a very soulful musician. That trait is apparent in his production approach, his singing, and his guitar playing — especially when he plays his pedal steel, which he features on Belladonna (see Fig. 1). Although Lanois puts a heavy emphasis on organic musicianship, he's also a master at using the tools in his studio (which he calls his “studio laboratory”) to come up with interesting new sounds.
At the heart of Lanois's approach, though, is his favoring of performance and atmosphere over technical perfection. When he emerged as a producer in the '80s, mixing desks were being automated. Lanois, however, highlighted the performance aspect of mixing, insisting on mixing by hand. While most producers were going for the glossy sound of digital reverbs and the sonic “perfection” of digital recording and of sequencers and drum machines, Lanois preferred low-fi analog effects and treatments, imperfect but soulful performances, and the warmth of analog tape recorders.
“A good performance will override any production idea or sonic idea that you can have,” says Lanois. “If you have a vocal that's strong and transports you as a listener, you're not going to worry what kind of EQ you've got on this drum or what sound you've got from that guitar. The delivery will override whatever small changes you can make in the sound. And the place where you record can make a huge difference. Unusual locations have much to do with creating a recording environment. We're talking here about creating spontaneity and performance in whatever way one can.”
Lanois's approach was effective and has become part of mainstream producing. It's at the heart of his two studio laboratories. “The house here in Silver Lake is a trilevel house,” explains Lanois, “and the studio is on the lower level. I still work with everyone in the same room together. I don't think of the recording equipment as something for other people in another room — although the house in Silver Lake has lots of little labyrinths, side rooms, and hallways, so there are some rooms I can use for isolation. I keep the drums in a separate little room, behind a Plexiglas door, so you can still see the drummer. The house setup in there is a couple of Neumann U 47s above, kind of like jazz miking, and the bass drum mic is either a [AKG] D 12 or a Coles.
“I have a 38-channel Neve 8068 desk here in Silver Lake that I have been restoring for years. It is a sweetheart. I also have loads of other small Neve desks, like the BCM10, the Kelso, and the Melbourn, which get used as microphone preamps. My favorite is the Neve 1066. I also like my API preamps. I've gotten some great vocal sounds from them. My main recording tool now is the iZ Technology Radar, a Canadian computer-based machine. It's in a similar league as [Digidesign] Pro Tools. Its sound is so transparent that it's not a vital link in terms of personality. I don't know what the sampling rate is, and it's not a great concern for me. The personality of the work comes from the source of the sounds, the players in the room, and the microphones used.
“I've built the Toronto studio since I finished Shine in 2003,” adds Lanois. “It is in a penthouse loft, which is about 5,000 square feet in size. It's big, like a dance studio, but it's not a crazily reverberant place. The sound has a lovely way of resolving itself, as if you were on the wooden stage of a beautiful old theater, where you have a great sense of space. There are no acoustic treatments; it has just a hardwood floor, loads of windows, and a wooden ceiling.
“The studio is in a corner of a big, open room, where I have a 40-channel Amek Tac SR9000 console and another Radar. I have almost every Studer tape recorder ever made, including an A80 in Toronto and in Los Angeles. Although I mainly use the Radar, the Studers are still there. I have to trust them, because I have made so many records that sound great on them.
“The secret of my studios is that I keep everything plugged in all the time. You pick up the bass, and it automatically shows up on a certain channel. It's like a throwback to the '50s, when studios would have a drum kit nailed to the floor and several amplifiers ready to plug your guitar or bass into. So each studio would have its own house sound. I am a bit of a romantic in that respect; I never liked a studio that neutralizes itself at the end of a workday. There is a spirit to each of my studios, and they happen to sound great. Toronto has a more open sound, whereas Silver Lake is more dense with more control. Microphones in both studios include AKG C 24s for piano and Shure SM57s and Sennheiser 409s for guitar combos. I also like the RCA 44 and the 77 — I love ribbon microphones.”
Power and Punch
Not surprisingly, given Lanois's emphasis on recording in locations where musicians feel at home, he welcomes the exponential rise of the home studio. “It is fantastic that you can walk into a music store and come out with a full studio for not that much money,” he says.
“Some great records will come of that, because people who can't afford to go into large studios but who are really talented and have great visions can now express themselves. The downside is that when recording to hard disk, you can keep putting off decisions and people become precious and don't want to chop things down. It is the curse of the modern world. Records have become longer, at a time when people have less listening time.
“My recommendation for home recording is to have lots of instruments and not so many microphones. Just have three microphones active, get a beautiful sound on each one, and move them around as you need to.
“Here is Daniel Lanois's tip for a great acoustic-guitar recording: leave the guitar in the case! Put up a couple of nice microphones — whatever you have in your studio that you think sounds great. I usually use a Neumann U 47 and a Sony C37a. Go to the console while you have one of those microphones in your hands, turn up the speakers, and get a really nice sound going on your voice. Get the preamp nice and hot, add a little bit of EQ, and crank up the LA2A or any other compressor until everything you are saying sounds beautiful.
“Now go to the other microphone and do the same thing. Then put the two microphones on stands in the neighborhood of the acoustic guitar, put some headphones on, shut off your speakers, and make the microphones
