May 18, 2003

U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel and . . . Daniel Lanois?

USTIN, Tex.
THE rich, mournful sounds emanating from Daniel Lanois's suite at the Inter-Continental Hotel here on a sun-drenched March afternoon belonged to a classic American stringed instrument whose timbre can, depending on the moment, call up images of the Great Plains, Hawaii's balmy shores or the outer reaches of the Milky Way. Mr. Lanois, dressed in his customary uniform of black T-shirt, black jeans and black knit skullcap, was bent over a Sho-Bud pedal steel guitar hewn from a vibrantly green chunk of maple. While his right hand plucked the strings and his left hand expertly manipulated the sliding steel bar that sounds the notes and gives the pedal steel its distinctive twang, he gazed down at the instrument with an affectionate glimmer.

As a record producer, Mr. Lanois has helped make music that is familiar to millions. His résumé includes career-defining albums for U2, Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel, and he has won multiple Grammy awards for his efforts. As a solo performer, with three CD's to his name, he has attracted a far smaller audience. Still, judging by the look in his eyes as he coaxed extraterrestrial tones from the Sho-Bud, Mr. Lanois, who appears at the Bowery Ballroom on Friday, is more comfortable as a musician than as an enabler of other musicians. He began playing steel guitar at 9; now 51, he continues to practice it daily. "It keeps me grounded," he said.

Mr. Lanois's public reassertion of the musical skills that keep him grounded comes after a long pause. His new solo album, "Shine" (Anti), is his first in a decade. Like his previous two, "Acadie" (1989) and "For the Beauty of Wynona" (1993), it mines several genres — folk, country, soul, psychedelic rock — while consistently maintaining a cerebral, ethereal, haunted atmosphere that often seems more important than the particulars of any single song. Unlike those albums, it gives pride of place to Mr. Lanois's old love interest, the Sho-Bud, which is heard prominently throughout and is the primary instrument on two poignant instrumentals, "Transmitter" and "J. J. Leaves L.A."

"Working with Emmylou Harris on `Wrecking Ball,' Bob Dylan on `Time Out of Mind,' Willie Nelson on `Teatro,' doing the `Sling Blade' soundtrack, all those months in Dublin making the last U2 record — these things take time," Mr. Lanois, who was in Austin to attend the South by Southwest music festival, said when asked about the 10-year gap between solo discs. "But I guess I must not have wanted to make another album until now. I buried my head in production for a while, and I was happy to do that, but too much of any one thing is not good, so now I'm going to concentrate on making music again."

A term Mr. Lanois often uses in discussing music is "depth of field," and this perfectly describes the way his productions, both for himself and others, blend sonic clarity and murkiness. "I Love You," the opening song on "Shine," for example, inhabits at least three separate aural dimensions. The backing vocal by Ms. Harris is so dry and crisp that the singer seems to be just inches from the listener's ear. Mr. Lanois's own voice, by contrast, is encased in a protective halo of reverb that distances it from that of Ms. Harris. Even further in the background is the fragmented electric guitar part at the song's core, which sounds as if it were recorded underwater several generations ago.

This kind of depth has been a trademark of Mr. Lanois's style since the early days of his recording career, which began in the early 1970's in Hamilton, Ontario. Already a professional musician, Mr. Lanois set up a four-track studio in the basement laundry room of his mother's house with the help of his brother Robert. The Lanois brothers offered their production services first to friends, then to local bands for $60 a day. "Even at that price, we didn't always get paid," Mr. Lanois said. "It wasn't much of a business."

Among Mr. Lanois's early clients were the future funk superstar Rick James, the Canadian children's artist Raffi and the new-wave band Martha and the Muffins, who for a time included Mr. Lanois's younger sister Jocelyne as their bassist. Then came a fateful 1979 meeting with the producer, musician and theorist Brian Eno, who had previously collaborated with Roxy Music, David Bowie and Talking Heads. "Somebody slipped him a tape that I'd produced, and he loved it," Mr. Lanois recalled. "On a whim, he called me and booked a session. I knew nothing about him, but we got along real well."

So well, in fact, that when a young Irish band called U2 asked Mr. Eno to produce its next album, he insisted that Mr. Lanois come to Dublin with him. The resulting album, "The Unforgettable Fire," from 1984, would establish Mr. Lanois as a major-league producer. To date, he has recorded three more albums with the group: "The Joshua Tree" (1987), "Achtung Baby" (1991) and "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (2000).

"Every time I've come away from a U2 record, I've made a Danny Lanois record," said Mr. Lanois, whose shy personal demeanor is offset by clear confidence in his own talent, and a Bob Dole-like tendency to refer to himself in the third person. "There's melancholy in their music, but they always have the capacity to raise the spirit too. I'm inspired by that, and I hope some of that same joy comes across on my record. Not that I'm trying to mimic U2, but their formula isn't a bad one to operate by."  

Mac Randall is a freelance writer and musi cian living in New York.