Interview on the recording of Time Out Of Mind

[Santiago]

A great interview on the recording of Bob Dylan's Time out of mind.
I can't remember where I got it from, so I will just paste it here...

Santiago

Daniel Lanois on recording “Time out of Mind”

"I like mystery and darkness in music," says Daniel Lanois. "I don't think
that will ever go out of fashion." As a producer, guitarist and all around
musical craftsman, Lanois makes records that are long on sonic atmosphere. His
distinctive style traces back to his early Eighties ambient work with Brian Eno
on milestones like "On Land" and "Apollo" and has continued to evolve through
his productions for U2, Peter Gabriel, his own solo records, Luscious Jackson's
"Fever In Fever Out " and the new Scott Weiland album "12 Bar Blues." Lanois'
affinity for ambience made him the ideal man to produce Bob Dylan's "Time Out
Of Mind", the darkly evocative masterpiece that has reestablished Dylan's
preeminence as a critical fave and best-selling artist. Lanois had worked with
Dylan once before, on the latter's 1989 album, "Oh Mercy." The producer seems
highly attuned to the artist's restless, ever-changing musical vision; the
basic sonic game plan for "TOOM" established itself fairly early in the
project.

"Bob has a fascination with records from the Forties, Fifities and even
further back," says Lanois. "We listened to some of these old recordings to see
what it was about them that made them compelling. I concluded that what was
interesting about these records is what I call `depth of field,' with something
very much in the foreground, something else much further back and something
else further back than that. Obviously, that depth of field wasn't artificially
created. They didn't have multi-tracking back in those days. So I can only
assume that the results were arrived at by the placement of people and
microphones in the room. We decided that this was something to pursue. I knew
Bob had a feeling for that sort of thing."

With this in mind, most of the tracks were cut live in the studio, at
Miami's Criteria Recording. "Bob was in the corner," Lanois recalls; "and we
had the musicians all lined up in a horseshoe all around him." In some cases,
the musicians played over rhythm loops created by Lanois and percussionist Tony
Mangurian before the sessions. For the most part, these loops were discarded as
the players developed live song arrangements. But a couple of loops made it
onto the final record, most notably in "Highlands," the epic-length closing
track: "In the case of those tracks, the background is ongoing," sasy Lanois.
"It's cyclical. It's the live playing on the top that really provides the
evolution and expression. The undercurrent is consistent."

Lanois didn't worry about microphone leakage in the live playing
enviroment. In fact, he welcomed it. "Most of the vocals on the album are live
vocals," he says. "You have the advantage of the band spilling into the vocal
mic, which can be a very exciting sound, especially if you use a lot of
compression on the mic, as we did."

Lanois captured Dylan's voice with a Sony C37A microphone, the very same
one he used on "Oh Mercy": "It sill had Bob's name on it; we just pulled it out
of the box." Compression was provided by a vintage UREI LA-2A. The album's
distinctively processed vocal sounds were created by a variety of devices. A
stereo flanger program on an Eventide 3500 helped create the plaintive vocal
timbre on "Love Sick." "If somone were to describe that to me, I'd say, ' No,
I don't think you should use that effect on Bob's voice,' " Lanois says. "But
it happened to come up, and there was just something cool and 'transmissional'
about it. It almost sounds like he was being beamed in from a satellite or
something."

Elsewhere Lanois used what he calls "the Elvis echo" on Dylan's voice:
an 180 milisecond delay setting on an AMS harmonizer, simulating 7-1/2" ips
slapback echo from a Fifties tape machine. "Often the processing went down
while Bob was performing," Lanois explains. "We would record a clean vocal
track and a processed vocal track and then blend them to taste when we mixed.
But Bob would perform to the processing to give him inspiration. It's kind of
the equivalent of a Chicago blues harp, where you overdrive it. We tried to
encourage that as much as possible-that kind of P.A. vocal sound."

Since Dylan is a notorious editor and revisor of his own lyrics,
changing lines right up through the final phases of an album project, vocal
punch-ins were frequent occurences. Lanois devised a method for recording live,
ambient, vocal tracks in such a way that punch-ins woulds match the original
take: "When Bob wanted to change a line, we piped all the music back into the
room through a pair of stereo speakers to simulate the band being present in
the room, so that the spill into the vocal overdub line would match the live
performance. I've used this technique for a long time. It you record a live
performance vocal and then try to do an overdub with headphones, it's never
going to match."

The need to accommodate punch-ins of revised lyrics also guided
Lanois' approach to recording Dylan's acoustic guitar: "Bob used this little
baby Martin acoustic of mine," says the producer, "a small-bodied acoustic from
the thirties with a Lawrence pickup that just snaps into the soundhole. We ran
that into a late Fifties, tweed Fender Deluxe, which we miked with a dynamic
mic: a Sennheiser 409. We did the same thing on "Oh Mercy." That’s preferable to
just miking the guitar acoustically in the room because it solves a lot of
isolation problems. If Bob needs to change a lyric line later, we don't have
the old vocal still leaking into the acoustic guitar track. And those old tweed
Fender amps always give you a great sound."

The changes weren't only lyrical; there were frequent musical
revisions, as well. "The musicians in this project were all really great
seasoned players," says Lanois. "And I think part of Bob's tactic for keeping
seasoned players on their toes is to throw the last second spanner in the works
by changing the key or time signature of a song. Little thing like that! It
keeps people searching around. And I think Bob's right. A lot of times, those
were the interesting tracks."

Along with lyrics and music, Dylan's own vocal performances
constantly evolve as well- anyone familiar with his live shows will attest.
"For any given approach to a song, Bob would do just a few takes," says Lanois.
"But there were several different approaches on some of the songs. For example,
we tried cutting 'Can't Wait' many times. There was a demo version that I was
really attached to. There was something very compelling about Bob's melodic
approach that I tried to hang onto. But I lost that battle. We ended up with
this other version, which is also great, but it's a little more spoken in it's
vocal delivery. Whereas the original was more melodic. But that's the evolution
of record making."