|
Santiago
|
 |
« on: February 18, 2005, 07:47:57 AM » |
|
Interviewer seems a bit negative, but interesting nonetheless.
from Sound On Sound 1993
Canada Dry
Daniel Lanois has followed up a career producing acclaimed recordings for
the likes of U2 and Peter Gabriel with two solo albums which have earned him
equal respect as an artist in his own right. PAUL TINGEN talked to him about
the changing directions in his own music.
Ever since his commercial and artistic breakthrough as a producer with the
U2 album The Joshua Tree (co-produced with Brian Eno) and Peter Gabriel's
'So' in 1986, the work of Canadian Daniel Lanois has received almost
unanimous worldwide praise. With his now legendary emphasis on 'feel' and
'performance', exemplified in getting artists to record in unusual
locations, and his often unearthly sounding 'treatments', he was, and is,
recognised as a highly original creative force. Always having given the
impression that he was really a musician and artist who'd fallen into record
production by default, nobody was very surprised to see Lanois release a
solo album, Acadie, in 1988, further increasing his profile; critics admired
the exquisite, intimate, acoustic guitar-based sound and the strongly
narrative songs, often inspired by the French-Canadian folk tradition.
In the midst of the praise, Lanois himself came across as a rather
introverted, laid-back soul. This impression was strengthened when I met the
man for the first time in Eno's flat in West London in 1987. He was
remarkably relaxed and 'real', displaying not a whiff of star pride; here
was a man clearly at ease with himself and his public image. That was then.
But things change.
The first sign of this was the trouble it took me to get a second interview
with Lanois. Over the years we'd had several brief conversations on the
telephone. They were always purely professional, usually when I needed a
quote for an article, but it was never difficult to get a hold of him and
talk to him. But when, after the 1992 release of U2's Achtung Baby and
Gabriel's Us, it seemed time to do another interview, Lanois was suddenly
shielded off. I was dealing with people around him for a long time, who
clearly were more interested in me writing about his solo album than his
production career.
Finally, after dozens of transatlantic phonecalls and half-promises of an
interview, I was referred back to Lanois' record company, WEA UK, who
organised the press for his second solo album For The Beauty Of Wynona. What
it all amounted to was, in a nutshell, the birth of the image of Daniel
Lanois the artist, as opposed to Daniel Lanois the producer-musician. And
with that, it appeared that the gentle, unassuming musician and producer had
decided that he wanted to portray a much more aggressive and aloof image. So
much was also clear from the cover of his newest album. Acadie's elegant
white cover was graced with simple black and white pictures of a
melancholic-looking Lanois. But Wynona featured a disturbing shot of a
naked, emaciated girl holding a knife. And the pictures of a brooding Lanois
on Acadie made way for starker images of the Canadian, attired in head band
and other assorted hippy-inspired gear.
RECKLESSNESS
I finally met up with Lanois in a small room in the London offices of WEA.
His naturally attentive and polite demeanour was still there, but this time
Lanois appeared closed and restless. Somehow one sensed an underlying
impatience.
" To pick up a little Fostex studio weighing two pounds with one hand -- that
to me was a breakthrough!"
Much of the music on For The Beauty Of Wynona appears to express a similar
feel. Though the French-Canadian folk-roots are still there, the carefully
sculpted intimacy of Acadie is gone, replaced by a wild orgy of drums,
treatments, and distorted electric guitars, and the aim was clearly to
achieve a spontaneous, live feel. The result, though in places brilliant,
sounds at times also ragged, unfinished, blurred, almost chaotic. "Yes,"
nodded Lanois, when asked to comment, "Wynona is a much harder hitting
record than Acadie. It was built on fiery backing tracks played live by a
band, and when you start with that sort of foundation, you're constantly
reminded of high energy and anything else which you put on will be a
response to that energy. Ultimately you end up with a tougher sound. The
tracks on Acadie were usually started from quiet, single-instrument
beginnings, mostly me on an acoustic guitar, whereas on Wynona everything
had a raw, interactive, band beginning. I think I've grown a little bit
tired of polishing details on records. I'd rather spend my time pushing more
rock-like performances. I think musical recklessness goes a long way on
records and you don't hear enough of it. I'm evolving away from the more
atmospheric moods of the past. I'm still real interested in setting strong
moods in music, but, for example, I'm trying to expand my tool box in
treatments beyond pastoral sounding long tones, to shorter, harder, more
explosive-sounding tones.
" I tried to operate extremes on Wynona. A track like 'Brother LA' might
grate on you a little bit. It came out of a jam during a party that went out
of control. My guitar processer broke down and went into psychedelic
feedback. Normally speaking you get a technician in to repair it, but I just
loved the effect and built the song around it. When you get a gift like that
you use it. On the other hand there's a track like 'The Collection Of Marie
Claire' which is down to one dobro. I think there's grit in both these
approaches. And we all like a bit of grit when we can get it."
BEAUTY IN PERSPECTIVE
Lanois carried on to describe the central theme of For The Beauty Of Wynona:
" We all know the kind of beautiful and pristine sounding records with a very
wide stereo image that have come out over the last years. Yet I don't want
to make beautiful sounding records. I want to make records that have beauty
in a small part of the picture. A beautiful flower in the corner of a
picture of a dirty railway track will show up much more than if it was
placed in the corner of a beautiful picture. If everything is beautiful you
have no depth. Beauty will only be noticed in perspective, in contrast with
something that is not beautiful."
One doesn't often hear an artist say that he doesn't want to make beautiful
sounding records, and it's even more unusual to hear a world-renowned
producer make this comment, or to hear him say that he isn't interested in
" polishing details on records anymore." Whilst it's true that many records
today are over-worked and that an element of recklessness would have helped
them, Lanois' statement seems further evidence of his shift in focus from
being a producer to being an artist. Whatever, the parallels between Wynona
and Lanois' two most recent major productions are striking.
U2's Achtung Baby has a similar quality of unrest, raggedness and
recklessness. Even Gabriel's Us sounds looser and less perfect than its
predecessor So, to the point where it elicits off-the-record comments from
people close to Gabriel that the production is in places 'sloppy' -- a
striking observation about a project that took almost two years to record!
FEEL BAROMETER
Did problems arise when it came to fusing Gabriel's legendary attention to
detail and Lanois' preference for recklessness? The Canadian responds: "It's
true that Peter likes detail, but he also likes performance a lot. Having
watched Peter for a long time now, I know that this is the aspect of
recording that he enjoys the most: giving it hell and jamming it out with
the band. His attention to detail generally goes into the area of sonic
creativity. He likes to break new ground sonically and I encouraged him to
spend time on that."
With U2 there were no possible problems of intention, because both Lanois
and the band deliberately wanted to be reckless: "They were interested in
having some harder hitting, clear-cut music. So we managed to re-introduce
some of the fun and fuzziness which were present on some of the records of
the '60s and '70s, where the drums were all distorted and there was a fuzz
bass going on. I was very much a feel barometer at those sessions. They were
investigating new territory, and I kept an eye on the emotions, making sure
that there would be enough 'emotion' content on the record." And of course,
the Gabriel and U2 sessions in turn influenced Wynona.
" My record was done in short spurts between the cracks of U2 and Peter
Gabriel. I once thought that that would be an awful disadvantage, because I
wouldn't be able to give my own work priority time. But there's something
that comes out of these guerilla sessions, where you are forced in and
forced out very quickly. In a way you don't care so much about the results.
When you do something that quickly, you don't get a chance to get
sentimental about it."
Lanois was born 42 years ago, raised in Hamilton, Ontario. After paying his
dues, playing guitar in a variety of R&B and dance bands in his teens, he
started a studio with his brother Bob in the basement of his mother's house
in 1970. They recorded a variety of roots music -- C&W, gospel, blues and so
on -- and were successful enough to have moved on to 24-track by 1980. The
studio was called Grant Avenue, and developed a name as a place where a lot
of innovative work was done. This attracted Brian Eno, who visited in the
early '80s and worked with Lanois on an album by Harold Budd called Plateaux
Of Mirror. A partnership was born which lasts till this day. Lanois
co-produced Eno's On Land (1982) album with him, and the two collaborated
with Roger Eno on the album Apollo, Atmosphere & Soundtracks (1983). During
the mid-'80s Lanois also co-produced
|
