Daniel Lanois on Belladonna Nocturne and Career
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- Daniel Lanois released Belladonna Nocturne, an instrumental album he describes as a 'grab-bag of inspirations' recorded piecemeal at his studios in Los Angeles and Toronto
- Lanois recently toured Texas with Micah Nelson (Willie Nelson's son) and has an upcoming collaborative album called The Ocean Floor released under the name Particle/Lanois
- Lanois co-wrote 'Unshaken' with D'Angelo for the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack, expanding Rocco DeLuca's one original line into 30 additional lines after D'Angelo struggled to connect with an initial 6/8 rock track
- Lanois recorded a cover of Bob Dylan's 'Ballad of Hollis Brown' with the Neville Brothers on a 12-track Akai mixed to a shoulder-strap Sony cassette — a 'test track' he played for Dylan before producing Oh Mercy and never bettered
- Lanois produced U2's No Line on the Horizon during a lengthy Morocco session where the band fell ill, after he had urged them over lunch in southern France to finish ten songs they had already completed
- Lanois builds 'dubs' by sampling from each song's own source material rather than adding new sounds, and refers to his stockpile of unfinished musical ideas as 'the melody orphanage'
Why it matters: Lanois pushes back against his reputation as a sonic auteur, arguing that 'sound is my thing, but that's not the main thing that I bring to the table' — his real contribution, he insists, is 'the soul of a record.' The interview surfaces the casual accidents behind canonical work: a cassette mix that Dylan approved before Oh Mercy, a Morocco session that derailed a finished U2 album, a pivot that salvaged the D'Angelo collaboration.
