Daniel Lanois on Soul Over Sound, Dylan, U2
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- Daniel Lanois released his new solo instrumental album Belladonna Nocturne, with tracks like "Inside the Walls of Puebla" and "Warp Sustain" recorded across his studios in Los Angeles and Toronto on a Steinway piano whose hammers he laminated with felt to approximate a softer Fender Rhodes touch.
- Lanois just came off a Texas tour with Micah Nelson (Willie Nelson's son) on the Outlaw Tour and Willie Nelson's Fourth of July picnic, and is preparing to release an album called The Ocean Floor under the name Particle/Lanois before heading to Canada and Scandinavia.
- Lanois recorded his cover of Dylan's "Ballad of Hollis Brown" with the Neville Brothers on a 12-track Akai mixed to a Sony cassette machine — one of two test tracks he played Dylan before producing Oh Mercy — and says "I never bettered the mix."
- Lanois collaborated with D'Angelo on "Unshaken" for the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack, building the song around the line "May I stand unshaken amidst the crash of worlds," originally written by Rocco DeLuca and recorded in New Orleans.
- Lanois produced U2's No Line on the Horizon in Morocco after suggesting at a lunch in southern France that they finish 10 existing songs; the band scrapped that plan, "everybody got sick," and the extended sessions stretched back to Dublin.
- Lanois describes his signature production technique as sampling from the song itself and building additional material through dubbing, explaining: "I'm not adding a new sound. So there's a reassurance that it's cut from the same cloth."
- Lanois keeps a stockpile of unfinished song fragments he calls "the melody orphanage" — "songs-to-be, but haven't found a home yet" — a practice he shares with collaborator Brian Eno.
Why it matters: The interview is a rare window into how records like Dylan's Oh Mercy and U2's No Line on the Horizon actually got made — including the Morocco sessions derailed by illness and the cassette-mixed Neville Brothers test track that won Dylan over — arriving alongside Lanois's most personal solo album in years and a Canada-Scandinavia tour that puts his process back in front of live audiences.
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