Daniel Lanois had already worked with U2, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson and Brian Eno before he produced his first record for Bob Dylan. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t wary of taking the helm for 1989’s Oh Mercy.
“Sure, it was frightening,” Lanois tells Classic Rock. “But the bigger the artist, the harder they’re looking for truth. Bob, like other great artists, has a pretty effective bullshit-o-meter.”
Something obviously clicked, because Daniel Lanois returned to produce Bob Dylan’s multi-Grammy-winning 1997 album Time Out of Mind. His involvement with Bob Dylan’s most recent release, the Frank Sinatra songbook project Shadows in the Night, is indicative of their evolving relationship: Lanois evaluated it as a friend.
“Bob came to my place in L.A., and he played me all that material — 21 songs, two records’ worth of songs,” Daniel Lanois tells the Irish Times. “He stood two feet back from the microphone, like Sinatra did, and it’s really great. It’s a pretty humbling place to put yourself in, as a proficient songwriter, that you’re not going to write one song but pay respect to what you’ve come up with.”
Lanois has been focused, more recently, on his own music — he’s issued a 10th solo album, the ambient Flesh and Machine — rather than producing. Other than his long-standing relationship with Rocco de Luca, Lanois has remained largely absent from that side of things since working on Neil Young’s 2010 album Le Noise.
“The Rocco de Luca record was the last one — and I’m not interested in working with any bunch of little fucking twerps again in my lifetime,” Lanois adds. “I’m just interested in doing my own music.”
Mostly, it seems, because of the time it takes to do such things. Certainly, Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, for all of the acclaim it received, turned into a very long process.
“It doesn’t mean I’m giving up or anything. I’ve made some very fast records and I’ve made some very slow records — and I’m not talking tempo here,” Daniel Lanois tells Hot Press, laughing. “Try sitting in a chair for two or maybe three years and tell me how you feel.”
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