Daniel Lanois
solo artist/producer

 

May 15th, 2003- Backstage at the Echo Lounge- Atlanta, Georgia

 

LK: Talk about some of the earliest music that influenced you as a child.

Daniel: As a child there was a lot of violin music around me. Those French Canadian melodies always stuck with me. And they’ve made their way into my own songs.

LK: In your childhood were there any experiences that happened to you that led you to believe that you would be doing what you do today?

Daniel: I think the separation of the family, my folks split up, and my Mom transported the family to outside Toronto, so we went from French Canadian to English. I sort of poured all of the emotions that were associated with that into my music. I started playing little plastic recorders, like a little penny whistle kind of thing, and it was just sort of my outlet for whatever I was going through. I played it, and played it, and played it, and I think it’s probably those early years of sort of becoming a young man and realizing not all was well. I think that’s probably one of the experiences that allowed me to divert the energy to music. And then, from there, kind of entering the teenage years, same kind of thing, whatever problems I was going through as a teenager I would just re-direct whatever disappointments I might have had with myself or anybody around me, I directed that energy back into the music.

LK: If we give you some words, will you just respond to them?

Daniel: Yeah.

LK: Slow Fear.

Daniel: Slow fear. The same kind of shadows, eventually kind of having to find a way out, building confidence, looking for ways to be loved, looking for ways to not be common, looking for ways to be special, and finding an outlet to distract the mind from delinquency, the usual sort of potential habits, drugs, but most of all staying away from commonplace.

LK: Blue Screen.

Daniel: Not much a part of my world. I know it as a filming term of course, perhaps if I wanted to be positive about it for a minute I could think of my Blue Screen being my ability to isolate something that I regard to be unique and special and in the presence of a lot of debris and confusion and cacophony, to pull out the very thing that I regard to be magic. And extract it from the usual business and put it in a quiet background.

That would be my idea of Blue Screen.

LK: Pink Fuzz.

Daniel: That conjures up images of my interest in synthesizers very early on. I bought the first Mini-Moog that came into town. I was pretty infatuated with the possibilities. It’s probably the thing that led me to think in terms of block diagrams and ultimately to challenge conventional ways of interfacing equipment. Oddball interfacing has always brought me interesting sonic results. So that’s what comes to mind.

LK: Lamppost and Television.

Daniel: A friend of mine thought that he should destroy all television broadcasting. He was a rebel young man. He thought that it was the contamination of the future. He felt that it would be the erosion of good letter writing, and it would be the enemy of literature. That it would promote illiteracy and kind of laziness, and some sort of complacency that would lead us to a poetic breakdown. He thought he would do the world a service by destroying television. What was the other one?

LK: Lamppost.

Daniel: Lamppost, that’s more like Paris, romance, like time stood still. The sort of inspirations that I think will always exist even in the presence of technology.

LK: Mermaid and Pharaoh.

Daniel: A friend of mine has a club in New Orleans called The Mermaid. It’s a really great crossroads for all kinds of people with ideas. Bands come through recording, and it’s a nice reminder that congregation should always be in passion even though we’re living through times of mass communication, I think people still like to hang out.

Pharaoh, mysteries of the past. How did they ever do it? How did people keep time back then? I think there must have been, in the absence of technology, or at least what we know of technology, like machines, and pre-industrial revolution times, I think that maybe mystery was highly regarded. There was probably a kind of spirituality that was alive back then that we wouldn’t know about.

LK: Black Feather Limbo.

Daniel: I grew up as a Catholic, and Limbo was a big part of it, you know like between Heaven and Hell. But I quite like Limbo. I think it’s a resting place, and if you’re not sure about where you are going, why not embrace the mundane. As a smart friend of mine would do, he wouldn’t try to be productive in the usual fashion if he was in Limbo. He would say, I’m going to sit here, I’m going to look at these two sticks and I’m going to try to make something out of that. In limitation we may find ways of becoming a master.

LK: The Perfect Word.

Daniel: I’ll say “Signwave” for now. Signwave is a musical term for a pure tone. I regard my pedal steel guitar as being my current Signwave. It’s the instrument that is currently connected to my soul and my heart, it happens to have a very beautiful, pure, clear tone, and it’s absolutely harmonious. It’s like, my beacon for dedication right now.