An Interview with Daniel Lanois

GRAMMY®-winning producer Daniel Lanois has worked with some of music’s most significant artists, but in collaborating with Neil Young on this year’s explosive Le Noise, he found a kindred spirit.

“I was always embarrassed of being a hard worker,” Lanois says. “I never paid attention to weekends or holidays or anything. Christmas? I’m working. [Laughs] And we talked about it. [Neil] said, ‘I’m the same way.’ He said, ‘Why should we operate by the markers of time as decided by somebody else?’ He’s not disrespectful to other people’s ways, but he’s a non-stop engine.”

In making the album, which recently earned three GRAMMY® nominations, Lanois not only gained greater insight as to Young’s artistry, but to his integrity as well.

“There’s nothing like getting to know somebody as a friend to find out what it’s all about,” he says. “We’re both Canadian, and I know we’ve traveled the world plenty, but it’s always comforting to be with someone from your own backyard. There’s an awful lot that gets spoken without words.”

What was your objective as far as what you wanted the album to sound like?

Well, the objective changed as we went along. It started out as an invitation to record ten acoustic songs and to film him, because I’d been making these little vérité films where the lens captures the performance and no crosscutting between cameras; just one camera, one lens for the magic take. He liked that a lot and said would I do that for him? And I said okay. And he came in with a nice batch of songs. Out of that session came the two acoustic songs, “Peaceful Valley Boulevard” and “Love and War.” Then some other nice ones, a few on piano. Then before when he was getting ready to leave, he said, “Well, I’ve got an electric one. Let’s try one electric one.” And we recorded “Hitchhiker,” and it was pretty much a balls-to-the-wall [song]. Then he went home. We worked for three days under the full moon. He went home and I listened to everything and I thought the two main acoustic songs were masterpieces. I told him that and I told him that “Hitchhiker” was fascinating and might he have another electric [song] or two for the next session? So then he brought in “Walk with Me” and “Sign of Love,” and they turned out great.

And I said to him, “Something is happening in the riff department here that I really like with these songs.” There’s always some action in the bottom, very riff-built, as is the case with “Walk with Me.” I said, “Okay, we have a chance to be lean and mean here, rockin’, even in the absence of a rhythm section, because the natural inclination would be to bring in a drummer. We thought about it, but then I resisted suggesting that because I found something cool about just one man standing — even though we’d strayed from the acoustic idea. Then we agreed: no overdubs, just sounds. Sonics are allowed, not overdubs. And we found a few cheap tricks that worked in our favor. There’s this automatic bass machine that I plugged in, seemed to work a good half of the time. It’s just really an octave machine. Then I supplemented that with wherever the bass machine had been tracked with another box that I had here, these old Taurus pedals that I had, and I mimicked the sound of the bass machine on the Tauruses… I meticulously went through all the tracks and popped in the right notes. Consequently there’s this great bottom on the project, but you don’t get the sense that there’s a bass player going for it.

There is a percussive push to it.

Yes, there is a percussive push to it, like on “Walk with Me,” especially, [like] little jolts of bass without having a bass part. And he loved it all. The more I did, the more he loved it. [Laughs] He said, “Do more! Do more!” And I came up with that crazy ending of “Walk with Me.” That’s a completely fabricated thing out of my dubs… The opening chord, that’s [from] about halfway through the song. I decided that that’s the spot where the energy really rose to the surface. [I said], “Why don’t we just start there?” And he said, “Well, I’ve never had anybody edit my songs before.” He was pining for some of the lyrics that I’d chopped out so we put them at the end. He was happy with that.

You’re known for working with some rather mercurial, headstrong artists: Young, Dylan, Bono, Peter Gabriel. As a producer how do you work with that kind of artist without extinguishing their creative spirit and vision?

Well, they all have something in common: They all like surprises. And they’re all people who are innovative, therefore searching for a new form of expression. Nobody wants to make the same record they made on the last one. Sonic surprises are safe territory. You’re not challenging anybody on content at that point. You’re just providing color. Oftentimes a gadget, a sound, a riff, something fundamental will make for a really great icebreaker. It becomes a point of interest for everybody in the room. It might be as simple as bringing in a cool pedal for the guitar player. And everyone crowds around like looking at the engine inside of a car. Oftentimes it’s like that where everyone can huddle up and have a bit of fun. Then it becomes part of the menu. I like to make a menu for each record. You can’t plan out a menu. You can make a menu relative to what’s available in the room, what people are coming up with. I find by paying respect to what people bring to the table, a nice exchange builds. People’s backs aren’t up. It should never be a competition.

Experience must dictate a lot of this, but when do you know when to say, “This isn’t working?” or “This other idea is better?” How do you know when to switch gears to reach some common ground?

Well, I usually encourage all ideas to be brought to conclusion, if you have the time, especially if you’re with a group of folks who want to experiment. Somebody’s got an idea, see it through. It just costs time. And then a few days from the work, everybody listens and it becomes clear what rises to the surface, what the strongest ideas are, and go from there. People are smart so they’re not going to be supporting a weak result. You never know about an idea until you bring it to conclusion. I try to say yes to everything, but in the end my commitment and my care — I think people really feel that I care about them and their music — so I might give some ultimate advice on content, as I did with Neil.

We had an excess of material. I said, “Neil, believe it or not, I think this should be an eight-song record. It should be 39-minutes long, just like the vinyl days. You’ve already got your two slow songs; the rest should be rockers.” So we had to put five or six songs into the coral that he loved, and I loved too. It would have weighed the record down. It would’ve made it a soft record, which I felt served him badly. So in the end he said, “You’re the man. You’re my editor. You’re my curator.”

So we should look for those tracks on Archives, Volume Two?

I think so, yeah. There’s some beauties there. There’s one that I loved called “For The Love of Man.” It’s got a little Roy Orbison in it.

Did Neil surprise you at all with what he brought to the table?

He surprised me with my requests. I would say, “Hey Neil, do you think you can come up with another riff rocker or two?” And he’d say, “Well, I’ll sit on the edge of the rabbit hole and see if the rabbit comes out.” But he always came up with them. It’s kind of a record-maker’s dream that you would send off the writer and he comes back with what you asked for.

And yet he doesn’t really write songs by instruction; he sort of waits for them to arrive.

Very much so.

He’s not a Brill Building kind of songwriter.

No, but he gets inspired easy. Some everyday little thing or encounter will provide him with the inspiration to write a song. Just saying hello to somebody on the street, he’ll find something in that encounter that’s fascinating enough to write a song about. One he wrote, “Someone’s Gonna Rescue You”... When he was in Hawaii, he met a fan on the street who said, “Hey, aren’t you Neil?” And they started talking and that fan was saying, “Man, music today leaves me lost. I feel like I’m lost.” And as he walked away Neil said, “Someone’s gonna rescue you before you fall!” A 30-second encounter turns into a song for Neil. Gotta love him.

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Interview: Greil Marcus Discusses New Book on Van Morrison

Last year when Van Morrison revisited his classic album, Astral Weeks, in select performances across the country, he called to mind one of the most compelling instances in his canon in which the music was borne out of a conviction that even the most unintended note or inflection could yield altogether new inspiration.

In his new book, When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening To Van Morrison, music critic and historian Greil Marcus examines this philosophy as it has manifested throughout the artist's career.

“It is at the heart of Morrison’s presence as a singer," Marcus asserts, "that when he lights on certain sounds, certain small moments inside a song…can then suggest whole territories, completed stories, indistinct ceremonies, far outside anything that can be literally traced in the compositions that carry them.” Marcus encapsulates that vocal capacity in a word—adopted from another Irish singer, the late tenor John McCormack, who intended it as a distinguishing vocal trait—which, in turn, informs his assessment.

There's a term you reference in the book, the “yarragh,” which seems to be an unreachable, intangible essence.

It’s definitely intangible; it’s not unreachable. Because if the book is about anything, it’s about those moments when he does reach that, and some times when he falls short that you can kind of see what he’s aiming at. I’m taking it to mean any moment in a piece of music where the performer breaks through the boundaries of ordinary communication. And you just said something about essence, and that’s really it. You reach a point where you are getting across emotional depth and intensity and completeness that in many cases goes beyond words, any ordinary words, but goes beyond vocal sounds too.

You write that Morrison is on a quest, one that’s “about a deepening of a style, the continuing task of constructing musical situations in which his voice can rise to its own form.” That leaves the audience—whether one listening to an album or live in concert—out of the equation, doesn’t it? If he’s just up against himself…

Well, in that sentence, sure. Except if it’s about communication, if it’s about breaking the boundaries of communication, you have to have someone to communicate to. And that’s not yourself.

In the context of his live performances, you touch on how Morrison can be diffident and aloof with his audiences, yet resonate so profoundly with them.

I think it really is about sound, the kind of sounds that he can, or on a given night, can’t, generate. And so often that’s a matter of momentum, musical momentum, rhythmic momentum, and emotional momentum. I think I have a line in the book where…I’m thinking through him, as if he were saying, “Just because I have these songs I want to perform doesn’t mean there has to be people here to listen to them.” I’ve done one reading for this book and I learned a lot from the audience that night. One person talked about a night he had gone to see Van Morrison, and after the show he went to a bar and there were a lot of people at the bar who had been to the show. And after a certain point Van Morrison came in and people stood up and they cheered. He sort of didn’t really acknowledge that. And the guy who was telling the story said that he finally worked up his nerve and he went over to Van Morrison to try and tell him how much his music meant to him and how glad he was that he’d been able to be at the show that night. Morrison turned to him and said, “Why is it that people feel the need to tell me these things?” Why does the audience have to exist at all? [Laughs]

There’s a documentary, From A Whisper To A Scream, about the history of Irish music in which Van Morrison is interviewed on Astral Weeks. While other subjects in the film praise it, Morrison acts like it was just another album: He went to work, made a record, and moved on to something else.

No performer, or no person who does creative work whether it’s a novelist or a singer or film director, actor, wants to be the prisoner of his or her past work. Otherwise you can’t go to anything new with a sense that is new, that you’re going to do something you haven’t done before, [that] you’re going to break through into an area you’ve never been able to reach before. I would think that would be both incredibly tiresome for Van Morrison to always have people tell him, “I love Astral Weeks so much,” or whatever it might be. And then he might say or he might imagine, “Well, did you hear The Healing Game or did you listen to Keep It Simple?” “Oh no, man, I stopped buying records back in 1981.” That’s awful.

But music occupies a certain nostalgic position in people’s lives. If you hear a Beatles song or a Rolling Stones song from the ‘60s, that triggers a memory in your mind.

Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure it really works that way. God, no one is more nostalgic than Van Morrison. No one takes nostalgia for childhood, for being a teenager or being the kind of teenager maybe he never really was, but would’ve liked to imagine he could have been— 

You think he looks back like that?

He very explicitly looks back. Over the last twenty, twenty-five years in song after song after song [he’s made] nostalgia really the centerpiece in terms both of melodies and rhythm and words of his music. And yet, I think it’s always to get somewhere, to get to the childhood [you] didn’t live; to see the things you didn’t see then; to do the things you didn’t get to do then that you only wished you could. I mean, when you listen to “Behind The Ritual,” which is on his last album of new songs [Keep It Simple], it starts out as simple and kind of puerile nostalgia and it becomes something so much richer.

When I hear something that's really powered by its own engine [and not] by whatever associations I might bring to it—say, "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones, which I hear on the radio every few days and I feel like I have heard it on the radio every few days since it came out—it's like I'm hearing it for the first time. And I'm noticing things I never noticed or some aspect of the song seems primary where before it seemed just like decoration. I don't think it has anything to do with nostalgia. I think it's about somebody responding to something and becoming more of a person because of that experience. When one's reaction is nostalgic or if it triggers a memory or some past association, that reduces whatever it is you're responding to to something like looking in a scrapbook or your old high school yearbook.

Like associating a song with your first car.

Yeah, whereas we're talking about art. We're talking about the way art moves people and upsets people, makes them feel fulfilled and glad to be alive or whatever it might do. Which means that it can never really be controlled. It can never really be fixed. And I think Van Morrison has made so much unstable music that that kind of thing can happen in so many different places in any stage of his career.

Having attended Morrison’s Astral Weeks concert in Berkley, were you compelled to measure the performance to the album? Or did you just take it for a concert?

No, what I wanted was for the songs to come alive in a way that they didn't on the album, [to] take a different shape. In other words, to play these songs as opposed to playing the album. And they played the album. So it was a replication, really, or as close as they could come. There weren't any moments of surprise or spontaneity. And in that sense it was really disappointing… I saw him in early '69 in San Francisco at the Avalon Ballroom. He was playing with just two other musicians, a bass player and a flute and saxophone player. He did all of Astral Weeks that night, not the order of the songs they appeared in, which he didn't do last year either. And there wasn't any question that he was still lost in that music. It was not a closed book to him at all. I remember that in some ways more vividly than the show just last year.

Given how you describe Morrison in the book, do you see any comparable artist? The one that comes to mind is Neil Young.

Neil Young is probably the best analogy. I think that's really on the mark. Not that they're identical or maybe even that similar, but... There's a moment on "Over and Over" on Ragged Glory where something absolutely extraordinary happens in the middle of the instrumental break. The only way I've ever been able to describe it to myself is that the song turns over. I've only heard that one other time, in one other piece of music. So I don't think it's something anybody can aim for or really replicate. And if you listen to the Dead Man soundtrack that Neil Young did, which is just him playing guitar, I think you can hear that same sense of trust in the music or in your own ability to find it, but also the willingness to just go out there, poking around in the bushes for days if that's what it takes to find what you're looking for. I love something Neil Young said in the '90s, and he was being interviewed on the radio about grunge. And he said something like, "Ya know, all those old guys who play guitar, they don't know what grunge is." And I'm thinking, All those old guys? [Laughs]

Like Eddie Vedder?

I don't know what he meant—Neil Young at that time was one of the old guys—but he was saying, "All these old guys, they don't know what this is. They don't understand it. When you play that kind of music, there's no feeling like it anywhere." And he's saying, "I play this music in order to feel myself emotionally respond to the sounds that I'm creating. I'm my own listener." What a wonderful thing. Now whether Van Morrison is his own listener in the same way, probably not. But they're both people who can be enormously frustrating in terms of making tiresome music, making albums that you never want to listen all the way through let alone ever play again, but that you can't ever write off. You have no idea what they're going to come up with.

Of the general observation you make in the book, that there are elements at work in Morrison’s music that aren't necessarily charted note for note—that some things just happen—do you think he perceives what he does as having that much to do with chance? Because he's extremely talented.

I can't speak for him. I did find something he said in an interview very revelatory where he said something like, "The only time I'm really concentrating on the words is when I am writing them. But after that, when it comes time to sing the song, I release the words. And the words go out and they do what they want. Sometimes it's me chasing them or it's not up to me how they are going to arrange themselves." So if it's not exactly chance—and God knows there are enough horn arrangements in his music. There are arrangements. There are charts. They've been structured. They've been given to the musicians—then it is an openness to surprise, to spontaneity, to letting a piece of music go somewhere that you didn't intend. I've always been interested in music as event, as the record is something that actually happened as opposed to something that you really could do seventeen takes on and most people wouldn't notice the difference between them but the musicians can tell when one's a little better than the other.

I always think of the Rolling Stones' "Going Home," which is on Aftermath. The story always was that they had this song called "Going Home" and the first two-and-a-half minutes or so are Mick Jagger singing about going home. It's actually kind of dull. Then at the point where the song would be faded out, somebody finds something interesting in the rhythm and keeps playing. And they start to fool around with the rhythm. And the story was Charlie Watts, knowing that the song was over, got up from behind his drum kit and started walking out of the studio while everybody else was still playing. And somebody yelled at him, "Get back there!" I don't know if that story's true or not, but I love the story. And of course they go on for another, what is it, nine minutes or something like that in one of the most extraordinary things they ever did, and something they never have been able to or maybe never even tried [again]. They didn’t record it again; they've never played it live. It was something that happened. It was when they discovered themselves as musicians. Now that kind of event for the Rolling Stones is very unusual. For Van Morrison, you hear that kind of event all through his music, over and over and over.

How much credence do you give to Morrison’s talent, though, as opposed to something magical that happens? There has to be a baseline of talent to even have the possibility for magic to happen.

Well, I think his talent, at its deepest, is for opening up a feel where magic can happen. That's his talent. People who don't have any special talent, who really do just go through the motions or who have developed a product that market-research surveys have shown people will buy over the long term—and a lot of bands and a lot of performers really do work that way—don't have that kind of talent. Most of us probably don't. But I think he does.


When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening To Van Morrison by Greil Marcus is published by Public Affairs™, a member of the Perseus Books Group, 2010.


Greil Marcus photo credit: Thierry Arditti, Paris

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Neil Young in Review: Dreamin' Man Live '92

For years, Neil Young resisted what he’d considered the archetypal singer/songwriter, middle-of-the-road approach he carved on his 1972 album, Harvest. Never one to consent to having his music categorized or dictated upon, he spent much of the next two decades producing albums that satisfied his (at times, eccentric) tendencies rather than anyone else’s expectations. Such is what made his 1992 LP, Harvest Moon—with its folkish, gentrified style and its deliberately allusive title—an unlikely mainstream hit.

Recorded during various stops on the road before Harvest Moon was released, Dreamin’ Man Live ’92 rephrases that album (not in sequence, but in totality) through solo, acoustic performances. Young alternates between guitar and organ—with the occasional harmonica break—deconstructing the songs down to their structural, emotional core. 

Truth be told, these renditions don't sound all that different than their comparably low-key Harvest Moon counterparts, but Young redeems them with unflinching, soul-baring conviction and the sort of in-the-moment immediacy that only a live, solo treatment can inspire. So on something like "Harvest Moon" or "Such A Woman," for instance, he's not aimlessly work-shopping their arrangements or reflecting them in radically divergent lights—just more intimate ones.

Craftsmanship matters, of course, and indeed it's present here. Over the arc of this live album, though, sincerity matters—and resonates—most of all. And so as Young cuts to the quick of "War of Man" or the eleven-minute wonder of "Natural Beauty," in particular, he evokes their intrinsic spirits in ways both impassioned and strikingly prescient.

While Young’s similarly styled Unplugged album arrived on the heels of Harvest Moon the following year, it featured only three of its songs, but (and perhaps more importantly) also a band and back-up vocalists. In contrast, Dreamin’ Man Live '92 offers up the songs from Harvest Moon in a context closer to that of which they were borne. In short, this journey through the past is well worth the trip.

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Neil Young Unearths the Goldrush with Archives, Vol. 1

In a career as uncompromising as any in popular music, Neil Young has seldom sought the creative path of least resistance, instead yielding to the mystifying influence of his own muse. With unwavering conviction—believing that the best, most inspired works flow through, rather than from, one’s consciousness—Young is a rare figure in rock, one who is inextricably attuned to his art while, at times, shamelessly expressive of his most visceral and vulnerable emotions.

Long running on his own wavelength—and not just in the realm of music, incidentally—Young has produced a canon so prolific and singular that chronicling it has posed a host of problems, not least of them being its eventual scope and format. After years of false starts and thwarted expectations, though, the first installment of what promises to be a monumental undertaking has ultimately come to fruition.

Archives, Vol. 1 (1963-1972), comprises ten discs total. Nine of these feature music culled from Young's stints in Sixties bands from the Squires to the Buffalo Springfield, and continuing through sessions with Crazy Horse and on solo LPs like Harvest and After the Gold Rush (including assorted extras like a career timeline and memorabilia). The last disc features Young’s surreal 1973 film, Journey Through the Past. As a whole, the complete collection yields a genuinely compelling perspective of the rock legend.

Perhaps the most important factor to consider, at least in terms of its contents, is that this collection does not boast dozens of previously unreleased songs. There are no lost classics that have been unearthed for this project. Rather, it contains previously unreleased versions of songs (many of which are classics) culled from their respective era.

That said, among the music discs are formerly unreleased mixes (either mono, stereo, or promotional edits), live performances, or various pressings. Point blank, this is not a substitute, what-could-have-been view of Young’s career (a la Springsteen’s Tracks box), but rather an everything-goes exhibition of one particular creative period.

Given that most of the material is well-known—at least to Young’s fans, which are who this set is geared toward—what’s worth noting is not so much which songs work and which do not (as most fans have surely inferred as much by now), but instead what distinguishes the music of this era from later ones of his career.

For the most part—with the radio edit of “Ohio” being the strongest exception—the version of Young heard here is not the angry or irascible one who more frequently populated later albums like Tonight’s The Night, Freedom, and Ragged Glory. The artist heard here lay more in the singer/songwriter vein, brimming with feral self-awareness and rich perceptions. Even on familiar material, hearing alternate versions of songs like “I’ve Loved Her For So Long” (previously unreleased, live), “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” (first pressing), or an accelerated take on “Sugar Mountain” (previously unreleased demo), Young’s genius is palpable and promising.

Considering that Young’s career has never been much of a linear one—his sidetrack projects have often been more interesting than his original plans—the timeline feature on each DVD reflects those excursions and his overall efforts especially well. Plus, certain stops along the way yield further music performances (including a live montage taken from the Buffalo Springfield’s final performance) as well as photos, images of news clippings and other relative souvenirs.

Also not linear in any chronological (or even much of a logical) sense, Journey Through The Past finds Young around the time of the making and promotion of his 1972 album, Harvest. If not for a few select performances of its songs (including “Alabama” and “Are You Ready For The Country?”) and an in-studio interview with DJ Scott Shannon, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was simply a slapdash home video that Young once spliced together in his garage. The film does underscore Young’s eccentricities and humor quite well—and hardcore fans will undoubtedly enjoy his oddball antics—but it doesn’t do much to underscore the quality of his music.

Regardless, overall Archives, Vol. 1 overwhelmingly succeeds in exhibiting the breadth as well as the context of roughly the first quarter of Neil Young’s extensive career. While not for the casual fan, it yields a mind-bending and magnificent portrait of the artist as a young man.

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Rust Never Sleeps — Gets Good Mileage, Actually

Neil Young is gearing up for the April 7th release of Fork In The Road — a concept album about cars — and he’s previewing one of its tracks, “Johnny Magic,” in a self-made video that finds him, suitably, behind the wheel of a classic automobile.

In particular, Young is shown cruising in a ‘59 Lincoln Continental, which he recently converted to hybrid technology. And while this lean, mean, eco-friendly machine looks to be one viable way of the future, the rest of this ride — at least by the dilapidated condition of its interior — appears (endearingly) on the verge of collapse.

As for the song, it’s a guitar-heavy rumble — a la “Piece of Crap” or “Dirty Old Man” — that chomps on riffs like crumbs. And the refrain here reaches back to “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)” with its tongue-in-cheek chimes of “Johnny Magic! Johnny Magic!”

All in all, it makes for a fun little film, not least because of Young’s dog, Carl, who chills in the spacious backseat while his cantankerous master rocks out up front. Keep watch for the two-minute mark, when Young busts out an air guitar solo that’s impressive not only for his inimitable fingering style, but also for his ability to keep the car on the road.

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