Episode 1193 - Daniel Lanois
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what the fuckadelics what is happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast it's my podcast
Marc:Why am I talking in that tone?
Marc:It's been servicing the public since late 2009.
Marc:A new episode every Monday and every Thursday since the beginning of our run.
Marc:We're always delivering the goods here at WTF.
Marc:Always delivering the conversations.
Marc:Always engaging with the people.
Marc:Very exciting show today for me.
Marc:I don't know for you.
Marc:I don't know who you are.
Marc:I know what you do.
Marc:What do you do?
Marc:Who are you?
Marc:Do you know?
Marc:Do you have a handle on it?
Marc:Have you found out new things about yourself during this time?
Marc:Isolating, alone, with family, dealing with the hardships, masking up, suiting up, going out into the world, terrified of things we can't see.
Marc:I'm not talking about conspiracy theories.
Marc:I'm talking about the COVID.
Marc:Out here in California, we're doing our best to get everyone infected, apparently.
Marc:We seem close.
Marc:Got a new strain out here.
Marc:Super COVID.
Marc:Fucking COVID that can get through glass, brick walls.
Marc:Car metal.
Marc:Yeah, it's happening.
Marc:This indestructible COVID creeping at all surfaces, raining down in your yard amongst the leaves and the grass.
Marc:COVID just slowly drifting down from the skies like evil manna.
Marc:I'm excited about the show today because I talked to Daniel Lenoir.
Marc:who I've always been sort of fascinated with.
Marc:He is the inventor of a sonic universe.
Marc:He is the enabler of some of the older wizards of song to sort of enter their final years in a way that is mystifying and honoring a certain type of poetic darkness.
Marc:I speak specifically of Bob Dylan.
Marc:I speak of specifically the album Time Out of Mind.
Marc:which Lenoir produced, which is the first time he was really on my radar.
Marc:And I'm like, who is the wizard that created this cave for Dylan to walk into towards a shimmering but flickering light at the end of it?
Marc:Who is this man who cushioned the genius in this lyrical darkness?
Marc:Daniel Lenoir produced that record.
Marc:Produced U2's The Joshua Tree, The Unforgettable Fire, Octoon Baby.
Marc:A couple of those he did with Brian Eno.
Marc:Peter Gabriel of So, which I say so to.
Marc:But he's a longtime collaborator with Brian Eno.
Marc:And he's done amazing solo work.
Marc:Multi-instrumentalist.
Marc:Sort of fascinating.
Marc:Neville Brothers.
Marc:I can't.
Marc:The list is too big.
Marc:We'll talk about a lot of stuff.
Marc:But I'm sort of, for you music nerds or this specific brand of music nerd, for you Eno freaks, Dylan freaks, just music freaks in general, production nerds,
Marc:This is your time.
Marc:It was very exciting.
Marc:He's got a new record coming out in the spring.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:But it's very exciting.
Marc:Maybe it's called hope.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'm bleak as fuck, really.
Marc:And I got good feelings that Biden's going to hit the ground running and at least get some infrastructure around the act of governance again.
Marc:Get rid of the leftover grifters and babbling lunatics and conspiracy fuckwads.
Marc:Some governance, some leadership, some effectiveness around taking care of the fucking country.
Marc:And I don't know if it's hope, as I said, I don't know if it's hope, but I think that, you know, knowing narcissists and understanding how narcissists work, Donald Trump lost.
Marc:He lost.
Marc:And, you know, no matter how he bends that, he's still going to be treated like a loser.
Marc:But he's going to go to Florida and this idea that he's going to maintain his position as some sort of kingmaker, as some sort of influencer in the GOP.
Marc:I guess it's true.
Marc:But I bet you that he goes down there and wants nothing more than to give zero fucks and play golf.
Marc:He's a fucking loser.
Marc:He was always a loser.
Marc:But there's something about the victim shtick, the aggravated victim shtick, the grievance junkie victim shtick that broken people just take to.
Marc:Yeah, the victim shtick.
Marc:People love it.
Marc:Love the victim shtick.
Marc:It goes in deep to people.
Marc:I talked to my old man.
Marc:Now, my old man is...
Marc:losing it a little bit.
Marc:He's 82, and it happens.
Marc:But, you know, his new family, who he's been with for years, there's a... I don't know who does it or who or why.
Marc:I don't know him to be that interested or curious, but somebody's got him watching OAN or Fox News.
Marc:He's definitely got Republicans of one kind or another around him and in his ear, and
Marc:But there's a point where the discussion, you've got to stop calling the right wing, right wing.
Marc:Call them the American fascist party if that's what they're doing.
Marc:If that's who they are, that's who they are.
Marc:Conspiracies made manifest by technology in real world time.
Marc:bullshit non-reality people believing in non-reality will get more and more violent they have to to defend the non-reality to defend themselves from reality creeping in but my old man you know he's you know i i've lightened up on him because he's not really thinking as clearly as he used to i got on the phone with him just to catch up a little bit and i told him what i thought about the insurrection and
Marc:I told him, you know, what I thought about what's happening in the country.
Marc:And he's afraid of everything.
Marc:He doesn't quite know how to process it.
Marc:And he said, well, yeah, he said, yeah, here, let me see if I can do it.
Marc:Well, what do you think about this deep state?
Marc:What do you think about the deep state?
Marc:And I said, well, yeah, they're very disappointing.
Marc:If there is a deep state, they didn't do their job.
Marc:And I said, I don't think there's a deep state.
Marc:I think it's a created entity to add to the victim mode and the grievances and the conspiracy to brain fuck people.
Marc:He's like,
Marc:Yeah, I hear you.
Marc:I don't know about all that.
Marc:But so you don't think there's a deep state?
Marc:I said, I don't.
Marc:I don't.
Marc:I don't think there's a deep state in the way you're thinking about it or the way you're saying it.
Marc:He goes, so what do you know about this this this Hollywood?
Marc:And I said, what?
Marc:The Hollywood, the actor who, you know, who's from the pedophile ring, he moved to Greece.
Marc:And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about.
Marc:There's an actor.
Marc:And I'm like, what actor?
Marc:He's like, yeah, I don't know.
Marc:He's, you know, a big actor.
Marc:I'm like, you got to be more specific.
Marc:He's like, how old?
Marc:He's an older guy.
Marc:Like George Clooney, old?
Marc:No, older.
Marc:Like Michael Douglas, old?
Marc:Yeah, like that.
Marc:He moved to Greece because of a pedophile ring?
Marc:Yeah, I think so.
Marc:What are you talking about?
Marc:I know, it's what I heard.
Marc:It's like it's a Hollywood thing.
Marc:He says, but you're not part of that, right?
Marc:I'm like, what?
Marc:He's like, deep state.
Marc:I'm like, well, I don't know.
Marc:I applied, but I haven't got my membership card, you know, because Trump fucked up the post office.
Marc:So you're not involved.
Marc:I'm like, no, no, I'm not involved in Deep State.
Marc:I'm not Deep State, Dad.
Marc:He's like, well, that's good.
Marc:I'm like, all right, I'm glad you feel better.
Marc:Man.
Marc:Hey, but, you know, things are kind of loose up there.
Marc:They're a little loose with him now.
Marc:I'm not sure.
Marc:I think he was just happy that I was okay and that I'm not part of Deep State or the pedo ring.
Marc:So Daniel Lenoir, this is a very exciting interview.
Marc:It's a real music nerd interview.
Marc:For those of you who don't know his work, for those of you who do, I hope that I've engaged him in a way that you enjoy.
Marc:His new album is called Heavy Sun.
Marc:It's going to come out this spring.
Marc:You can check out the first single, Under the Heavy Sun, wherever you listen to music.
Marc:This is me talking to the studio wizard and amazing musician, Daniel Lenoir.
Marc:How are you doing, buddy?
Guest:I'm doing pretty good up here in Toronto.
Guest:You're in Toronto, you lucky fucker.
Guest:Yeah, of course, you know, anything we hear about Los Angeles and the media is like, oh my goodness, you know.
Guest:And ambulances have no place to bring COVID patients.
Guest:They're just driving around the block.
Marc:Yeah, I hear that too, man.
Marc:I'm sitting here in my house.
Marc:You still got a house over there, don't you?
Marc:Yeah, in Silver Lake.
Marc:How long have you been up in Toronto?
Marc:I guess a couple of months now.
Guest:Is that where you grew up around there?
Guest:I grew up, I'm French Canadian, but I grew up in Hamilton, which is near Toronto between Buffalo.
Marc:I know exactly where Hamilton is.
Marc:I spent two weeks in Hamilton that felt like a lifetime.
Marc:What were you doing there?
Marc:I was shooting a movie in the wreckage of your fair city.
Marc:I guess the tax subsidies and whatnot, they've made it very available to shoot practically in Hamilton.
Guest:Yeah, well, you know, it's got all the factories if you need an industrial setting.
Marc:We didn't need an industrial setting, but I think it was just, they just make it available because it seems like all those factories are long gone, Daniel.
Marc:They're long gone.
Guest:Well, they're still there, but not the same as they were.
Guest:But, you know, there's a lot of Victorian kind of houses.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it would be, you know, squint a little bit.
Guest:Could be Boston, could be a lot of places, you know.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But it's like there's a sort of collapse there that we see in a lot of the great industrial American cities.
Marc:When was the last time you went back?
Guest:Well, I stopped by regularly there, but I know what you mean about the collapse.
Guest:I took a train once from, well, from Buffalo, and I went all the way to New Orleans somehow or other, and I went through the backwaters of all those northern towns and
Guest:I saw a lot of that decline that you're speaking of.
Marc:Was that on the way to make your solo record in New Orleans?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That's interesting, that record, because, you know, you're French-Canadian and the sort of French-Cajun culture down there.
Marc:When you sing in French on that record with the accordion, it all seems to fold right in.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, as history goes, it's originally from up here.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:Yeah, the Acadians were expelled from Canada when the Brits took over, and the ones that were not about to...
Guest:follow the new rules they put them on a boat and they went south to louisiana and they overshot new orleans and went to lafayette and the the acadian became cadian cajun cajun cajun that's how it started so that's it that's the history so you're actually returning home to a degree a degree you were bringing bringing home back down to where it ended up it's kind of funny to think of it that way you have the
Guest:But yeah, the accordion has lived on in the Cajun community.
Guest:That old two-step is still happening down there, man.
Marc:Sure, man.
Marc:But you're telling me that the accordion sound came from Canada originally?
Guest:A lot of it did, yeah.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Did that come by way of... But it's different.
Marc:It's a different accordion than German accordion, right?
Guest:Yes, it is.
Guest:It's a limited accordion, the zydeco and the Cajun one that I'm thinking of.
Guest:I think some of those only play in two keys.
Guest:They only play in D and G.
Marc:But it's like not a polka groove, you know, like that came up through Texas, right?
Marc:So you get all that conjunto music and all the sort of brass and accordion stuff that infused Mexican music in Texas is not the same accordion that came up through New Orleans.
Guest:I'd say it's different.
Guest:Somehow or other, when it fell into the, well, the Zydeco music is more black and
Guest:The Cajun is more white, but the Zydeco is very, very rhythmic, if you're familiar with it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's rock and roll.
Guest:Well, let's talk about the melodies.
Guest:What about...
Guest:So those are all French Canadian, those kind of ones.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:Almost Celtic.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So you're tracking those rhythms because even the white Cajun stuff, it seems to have a little bit of a shuffle to it, right?
Marc:There's a little bit of a groove.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Whereas you get into that polka thing, that's tight.
Marc:That's German tightness.
Marc:Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Somehow or other I managed to sidestep the polka.
Marc:yeah that is not a polka step the sidestep i don't think yeah you got a swing past the polka there so growing up in canada i mean what was it because it seems to me like looking over and uh you know what you do and trying to assess what you do and i like the new song by the way i'm excited to listen to the new record okay good thanks man
Marc:I mean, what was it like to... I have to assume that on some level playing with Gordon Lightfoot as a Canadian must have been somewhat of an exciting thing.
Guest:Well, I played with Sylvia Tyson and we opened for Gordon Lightfoot.
Guest:But I know what you mean, that whole folk...
Guest:scene up here that was my time in in ontario but the time in quebec because i lived in quebec till i was nine in a place called gets you know which is an hour from montreal so i'm originally from around there so i'm a frenchie yeah and then my mom relocated the family to hamilton that's when i started speaking english when you were nine yeah and so the but back in quebec i heard um
Guest:And my dad played violin as my grandfather did.
Guest:They were called violonus.
Guest:And they played a lot of jigs.
Guest:So I was exposed to that neighborhood music as a child.
Guest:It was very melodic, a little bit like what I sang a minute ago, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And some of them very mournful in minor keys.
Guest:And so that was my first exposure to music.
Guest:You've sort of stayed in that minor key for a lifetime a little bit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, by emotion, if not specifically by a key.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:It's interesting to write a, you know, you referenced my first record, Akadzib.
Guest:There's a very sad song called Jolie Louise, which is kind of a happy... But it's a sad story.
Guest:It's about people breaking up, and the old man hits the bottle, and my mother packs up the kids, and then she's gone.
Marc:Is that a true story?
Guest:True story.
Guest:That's why we came to Hamilton.
Guest:Who hit the bottle?
Guest:Your old man?
Guest:Old man hit the bottle, and my mom put the four kids in a car, drove 500 miles, and she never saw him again.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:That's heavy.
Marc:Are you the youngest?
Guest:No, I have an older brother, and I'm the one below that.
Marc:So all those little kids, and he got out of control, and things got ugly, and she had to leave.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, she had had enough, and we came to Hamilton.
Guest:And then he picked up the three boys and stole us back, and then she went back one more time and stole us again, and that was the end of the volley.
Guest:He stole you back?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wait, he just showed up in Hamilton and said, get in.
Guest:Yeah, we were walking to school.
Guest:Three boys, he said, all right, you guys, get in.
Guest:And then we drove back.
Yeah.
Guest:That's chaos.
Guest:In modern times, this is kidnapping.
Guest:But back then, it was just the way it was, you know?
Marc:What did that... Where did you feel... I mean, you don't seem like an angry fella, and you don't seem like you're carrying a chip on your shoulder, that you're out of control yourself.
Marc:Were you just sort of torn between the two?
Marc:I mean, I don't know.
Marc:I've talked to you for 10 minutes.
Marc:Maybe I'm projecting.
Guest:Well, the... I mean, we...
Guest:We loved my mom, and we weren't fully aware of all the problems they were having, so we were happy to jump in the car with my dad.
Guest:But we had a great time back with him.
Guest:We lived in the woods in kind of a cabin cottage for a few months, and we shot arrows and rifles, and he worked in town and come back in on the weekend.
Guest:So we lived on our own, the three boys.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you're lucky you didn't know what was really going on.
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:I mean, in modern times, there's so much communication, you know, it would be different now.
Guest:But back then, we were just a bunch of kids, you know, trying to make the best of it.
Guest:I like the old man and everything, and we had a good time with him.
Guest:But, hey, marital problems are that.
Guest:So, you know, I think my mom did the right thing.
Marc:So, yeah, after leaving, I'm just sort of curious to define the sort of bedrock of the kind of longing, ethereal sound that runs through a lot of what you produce and on into working with Eno and some of your solo stuff.
Marc:I mean, I see that you have an appetite for and a desire to engage with all different types of music, but it seems like the thread is something slightly ethereal and heavy hearted.
Guest:Yeah, there is melancholy in there as a thread.
Guest:Where did that start, you think?
Guest:You think it started with that violin?
Guest:It might have started with the violin, but I was a loner as a child.
Guest:I started working very young, around 9 or 10.
Guest:I delivered the morning paper.
Guest:And I really liked it.
Guest:And I got to spend time by myself and walk around, ask all kinds of questions about what I saw and about life.
Guest:And I was pretty internalized.
Guest:And so I guess I developed my imagination started developing then.
Guest:But in regards to the melancholy.
Guest:I suppose a French kid moving into an English neighborhood would add to that, having to learn to speak English and being a bit isolated.
Marc:And I also think that living in the woods, I think that something about...
Marc:you know, that part of, you know, I don't really know where your father lived or what that part of North America or the continent looks like.
Marc:But, you know, having spent a couple of years in Alaska when I was a kid, there's a weight to that part of the world up there where it's cold and gray.
Marc:And that sort of like either it feeds you or it makes you sad.
Marc:And if it, you know, I don't know if the environment had any impact on you, but I find that my brain goes back to that sort of
Guest:melancholy grayness and i don't mind it i find it comforting yeah well we were pretty uh we were there in the woods i mean it wasn't entirely isolated as a place you know there was it was a lake and it was a tiny a little town you know 10 miles away and we got to go on the lake uh we
Guest:paddled out there anytime we wanted and you know had access to rock climbing and pine trees and all that it was very beautiful but but it was wild yeah and i think that the wild reminds you that uh you know you're an animal
Guest:yeah like bears like what's up there wolves yeah there'd be bears but uh you know uh deer and rabbits and you know yeah some of the usual uh wolves you know that kind of stuff you know sure a lot of a lot of bird life uh fish and all that you know snakes and uh you know kind of blood suckers on your leg when you come out of the water
Guest:Oh, the leeches.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So when did you start sort of digging into, like, it feels to me like I, you know, I, you know, I'm trying to put it together, but it feels to me that you're sort of rooted in, you know, you're fairly honest acoustic music, you know, from, from here and, and wherever you, you put it, you know, you take it, but it seems like, you know, whatever evolved into sort of a techno ish,
Marc:Ambient exploration was kind of rooted in acoustic music, no?
Guest:Yeah, the beginning was definitely acoustic music.
Guest:You know, when we got to Hamilton, I acquired a little penny whistle.
Guest:And I love that little whistle because I could really isolate melodies.
Guest:And I got pretty good at playing melodies because you can only play single notes on a penny whistle.
Guest:So that's what I did, and I really liked it.
Guest:I developed a little notation system, because I had not studied music yet at that point, so I invented a little notation system so I could remember my melodies.
Guest:And I liked those early years because it forced me to develop some kind of a way of remembering what I liked the most about my instrument and my playing and my discoveries.
Marc:Is melody?
Guest:Yeah, melody.
Guest:But what was interesting about it is I had not read music yet, so I wrote the low notes at the bottom, and we'll put the top note at the top, and then be in between ones.
Guest:So what I came up with was not unlike what we know as music written on a music staff.
Marc:But that was your own system.
Guest:And you eventually studied music?
Guest:Yeah, eventually I studied music.
Yeah.
Guest:My mom used to give me a dollar a week allowance to go to the movies.
Guest:But I'd seen somebody play clarinet on TV.
Guest:One day I'd like to play the clarinet.
Guest:So on the one Saturday going to the movies, I saw what looked like a clarinet a bit in a music store window.
Guest:So I went in and I said, how much for that?
Guest:He said a dollar and I bought the, it was just a plastic penny whistle.
Guest:Is that like a recorder?
Guest:Yeah, a little recorded, that's right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A little recorder, and that was the beginning there, and no movie on that Saturday, went to the penny whistle.
Guest:So I drove everybody crazy in the house for a while playing that thing.
Guest:But in those days, it was door-to-door canvassing, and someone from one of the music schools in the neighborhood, the Conservatory of Music,
Guest:A sales guy knocked on my mom's door and said, you got any kids that like music?
Guest:She said, yeah, that one there, he likes music.
Guest:And so I passed the aptitude test.
Guest:He said, okay, we teach accordion and slide guitar.
Guest:And I said, okay, I'll take slide guitar.
Guest:And that was the beginning of me as a guitar player.
Marc:Wow, so like out of all things, slide guitar.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What was the idea?
Marc:What was the angle?
Guest:That doesn't seem very Canadian.
Guest:I know, I couldn't figure it out.
Guest:But there was a little bit of a sly guitar craze.
Guest:I think it was kind of a, had come from, you know, that was the first electric guitar, you know, it was a sly guitar and it was kind of part of the Hawaiian music craze, I think.
Marc:Like the National Steel, like a Dobro or a, yeah, Dobro, right?
Guest:Yeah, Dobro.
Guest:But this was an acoustic guitar, really just a regular acoustic guitar, but very high action.
Guest:Right, of course.
Guest:And you get a little bar and then my lessons took me again to melody.
Guest:I played the melody on just things like River Valley.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And my teacher strummed the chords.
Guest:And so I continued with the melody, but this time on slide guitar.
Marc:So that's the gateway drug is that slide, man.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because, like, you know, there's no frets.
Marc:And, you know, you can do some real space travel with that shit, like a pedal steel or slide.
Marc:I mean, you can really get kind of out there with it.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:You can.
Guest:opposite of the piano, where the piano just is very specific to the note, whereas the slide allows you, you know, a little bit of portamento.
Marc:Right, yeah, that, and like that sort of weird kind of like, you know, African up through the Delta, kind of slightly dissonant tremolo business that can definitely do some time travel with.
Guest:Yeah, the tremolo part allows the player to get to a certain emotional place.
Guest:It's a bit like the voice,
Guest:La la la la la.
Guest:You play it real straight, sing it real straight.
Guest:And you get the little inflection on the right spot as a singer, but you can't do that on a piano.
Guest:But on the slide you can.
Guest:Yeah, you can get some haunted business going with a slide.
Guest:Yeah, it takes you closer to the theremin.
Marc:Right, which is a little, that thing is kind of ridiculous.
Guest:Well, it's hard to play.
Guest:You hear it in a lot of the old sci-fi movies at a spooky moment.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think it's a practical instrument for modern music.
Marc:I don't enjoy the sound.
Marc:Okay, well, I won't argue with you.
Marc:So when did you start in bands then?
Marc:I mean, did you consider yourself a blues guitar player or a Hawaiian-style slide player or somebody that could do anything with a slide guitar?
Marc:Did you move on to another instrument?
Guest:Yeah, I moved on to a regular Spanish guitar, you know, where it was fretted at
Guest:A regular, like a little Stella, a little Sears catalog guitar.
Guest:Sure, man.
Guest:Just a regular little Western guitar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I liked that a lot.
Guest:I got pretty good on it quick.
Guest:And, yep, I joined.
Guest:We had little bands in the neighborhood because there were some other kids on the block to play.
Guest:And, you know, we were playing in garages on rooftops.
Marc:And then when did you start cutting music or writing music?
Guest:I got a tape recorder when I was about 12, and that was the beginning of the recording studio.
Guest:It was a little flea market machine that had a microphone on.
Marc:Do you still have that in your studio, and you use it sometimes in your mixes?
Guest:I wish I did, but it's long gone.
Yeah.
Guest:But it was a one-stop shop.
Guest:It had speakers on board and the mic and everything.
Guest:All you did is press record, know where the mic is, and kind of do what we're doing, talking.
Guest:Then say, okay, Mark, let me wind it back, and then press the button play, and there we were.
Marc:And that's when you started doing the work.
Guest:That's when I started recording, and my friends came over, and I got pretty good with that.
Guest:I bought a little four-track, and then...
Marc:Oh, you did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you were like 15 or something?
Guest:Actually, I had one before then called a Sony, and it had this function on it called sound on sound.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So you record one thing, and then you put a sound on sound.
Guest:It allowed you to go from the left channel to the right while recording the microphone again.
Guest:That's how you recorded that Neil Young record.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, the Neil Young record wasn't too far away from that.
Marc:Neil, you just play one guitar and I'll lay it down, then you play guitar again on top of it.
Marc:That is sort of what that record is a little bit, right?
Marc:It's almost sound on sound in a way.
Guest:Well, it's in the sense that he didn't want anybody else playing on the record.
Guest:The invitation initially was...
Guest:But I record him doing 10 solo acoustic songs and film him as well because we make films as well.
Guest:Was that in your house?
Guest:Yeah, the one in Silver Lake.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the beautiful old place from the 20s.
Guest:And we emptied out the room and we had a lovely setting for Neil and a really great sound.
Guest:I presented him with my little Guild acoustic guitar and I'd set up a sound...
Guest:In the studio prior to his arrival.
Guest:And I said, check this out.
Guest:And he played it.
Guest:He didn't even take his own guitar out of the case.
Guest:He said, wow, it's beautiful.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Off we went.
Guest:But we had a little secret weapon.
Guest:We had an octave divider machine.
Guest:It's just this little cheap contraption that you put the guitar through, and the low strings trigger an octave below.
Guest:So the acoustic guitar suddenly had this seemingly a bass player playing with him, but it was just him on the guitar.
Guest:And then whatever didn't get tracked properly by this cheap device, I then supplemented.
Guest:I went and repaired the notes that weren't tracked with my Moog Taurus pedals.
Guest:So I did overdub on the record when Neil wasn't there.
Marc:Does he know that now?
Marc:Did you tell him later?
Guest:He'll know now after we talk.
Marc:If he's listening, I think he's probably maybe got better things going on.
Marc:But that's sort of it's interesting because to me, a lot of, you know, you're the modern production, you know, does incorporate all these elements of of a sort of analog and and and kind of a modern ancient sound.
Marc:that I associate with some sort of earlier time.
Marc:You know, whether it be echo or noise textures, they seem to be rooted in something nostalgic almost.
Guest:Well, it's an interesting segue to the...
Guest:to the manipulation of sound, and I took an interest in that in the 70s.
Guest:I worked with a Canadian producer named Bill Bryan, and he was always pushing me to weird things up a little bit, you know, try adding this and that.
Guest:That was the 70s, I guess.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it was the 70s.
Guest:Were you already producing?
Guest:Oh, yeah, I was already producing.
Guest:I made so many records through the 70s.
Guest:I was producing a lot of gospel records, funny enough.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yep.
Guest:I was associated with a Christian organization that brought quartets from all over the world to tour Canada, and they'd stop in my studio to make a record in two days.
Guest:So I did a lot of that, but I was also doing the more advanced experimental music, and that's what led me to meet Brian Eno.
Marc:Well, the gospel stuff, I mean, how did that affect you, those kind of vocal harmonies?
Marc:Because, like, you know, I do feel the history of...
Marc:something in in the music uh when i when i listened to it did we did you find that that that i mean i assume that you had to record the gospel singers pretty straight ahead right it was you didn't have to fuck with that too much yeah they were they were already very balanced uh acts and so i i uh i had a four track studio in those days
Guest:I love the gospel stuff because what I heard coming through the speakers was really my education about how parts fit together.
Guest:How so?
Guest:Well, you know, I got to hear, obviously, there's the fundamental, there's the bass part, and the lead is singing this one.
Guest:Oh, and then there's the harmony below and the harmony above.
Guest:So I got to hear all the voices moved according to the chords but serving the melody.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's the kind of stuff you might not get in a school.
Guest:You know, you can be in a school for 10 years and not be exposed to this kind of expertise.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that happened over the course of a couple of years.
Guest:So I got to hear some of the best singing, the best harmony singing from around the world just for doing gospel records.
Marc:And were you an engineer or actually producing?
Guest:I was more of an engineer, but I didn't know what a producer was then.
Guest:So I was just doing everything, you know.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I just got called that eventually.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And so tell me about this fellow from the 70s.
Marc:What's his name again?
Guest:Oh, Billy Brian.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's his story?
Guest:His story, he was in Toronto, drummer, producer, and he was recording a lot of the art bands from Toronto.
Guest:And we recorded the Downchild Blues Band with Donnie Walsh.
Guest:Donnie wrote a lot of songs for the Blues Brothers.
Guest:So it was that association.
Guest:But he was also recording...
Guest:a band called the Parachute Club, Mamakia, and then the Time Twins.
Guest:And the Time Twins went to New York and took the demos we made from my place, and they met Eno, and they played him the tape, and he really liked it.
Guest:So that's how I got to meet Eno.
Marc:And when you met him, what year was that?
Guest:I met Eno late 79.
Guest:Had you been a fan before?
Guest:No, I didn't know anything.
Guest:Didn't know anything about him.
Guest:So did you?
Guest:I lived in Hamilton.
Guest:What do you think?
Marc:I know, man.
Marc:It's hard to find that shit.
Marc:You got to find a guy at a record store that turns you on to that stuff.
Marc:It's not going to land in your lap.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, there was no internet in those days.
Marc:No, man.
Marc:I mean, if it wasn't for the guy who worked at the record store next to the restaurant I worked in high school, I would never know about Eno or The Residents or John Hassel or Harold Budd or Fred Frith.
Marc:I mean, granted, I was 14 years old living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Marc:I lucked out that that guy dumped that stuff in my head.
Marc:But you kind of need one of those guys.
Guest:You need one of those guys, yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah, on the one night I got introduced to Grandmaster Flash and Kraftwerk from hanging out with the Time Twins.
Guest:That's a big night.
Guest:That is a big night.
Guest:That's a brain-changing night.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely, man.
Guest:I thought the best grooves and then the...
Guest:the most clever stuff coming out of germany you know so like you said you know we we need those kind of those turning points and it might be the guy in the record store or maybe you got a girlfriend that's smarter than you you know yeah right yeah exactly i had that that girlfriend that she she turned me on to roxy music it all gets connected eventually everything gets connected then a guy left a
Marc:Live in 69 Velvet Underground album in my apartment.
Marc:I'm like, oh, and that's where that fits in, you know?
Guest:Okay, yeah, well, that'll do it.
Guest:The whole New York chapter, yeah.
Guest:I never got to New York.
Guest:No?
Guest:Well, I did, you know, around 1981.
Guest:It was my first time.
Marc:So with Eno, though, so this guy, you find out this dude likes you, and how is that presented to you?
Marc:Because, I mean, you know, that was, I assume, the beginning of, you know, what is a continuing creative relationship, and I imagine friendship.
Marc:I mean, that's going on 30-some-odd years, right?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, he came into my life and my studio with these piano recordings by Harold Budd.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he had already recorded the piano in New York, so he came to my studio with the view of processing on top, adding different sounds and textures.
Marc:Because of what he heard you do.
Marc:He thought you'd be the guy to work with on this.
Yeah.
Guest:He was tired of the studios in New York, and he really appreciated it.
Guest:He rolled the dice on my place, and he really appreciated that we were a small town.
Guest:We were, when I say we, myself and my brother Bob.
Marc:This was in Hamilton?
Guest:In Hamilton, and then we had small town manners.
Marc:But it's your studio.
Marc:I guess I missed that part.
Marc:You had started a studio in Hamilton.
Guest:Yeah, we finally got out of the basement of my mother's house, and at this point we bought a little building, one of those little Victorian houses, and we converted that into a recording studio.
Guest:So it was a sweet little spot, and what was nice about it, it didn't have a feeling of rushing around.
Guest:Right.
Guest:We paid attention to every project that came in.
Guest:And I really, I was very impressed with how directed he was.
Guest:His vision was very specific.
Guest:And then he, you know, I learned a little bit about him at that point.
Guest:And I thought, man, this guy's done a lot.
Guest:And he would devote himself to something that was seemingly quite obscure to me.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I loved it.
Guest:And I appreciated that he was willing to spend so much time with the details.
Guest:And I thought to myself, well, I'm going to jump in with Eno on this and not just be hitting the ball all over the place, doing too many kind of records.
Marc:But before that, you had recorded a lot of different stuff.
Marc:Well, mostly local stuff, right?
Guest:Local, but I had a few hits in Canada because I was starting to rise up as a Canadian record producer.
Guest:But, you know, I had to pay the bills, so we were recording whoever banged on the door, you know, the studio.
Guest:Anyone I know?
Guest:Well, there was, speaking of Rise Up, a band called The Parachute Club, we had a hit called Rise Up.
Guest:And that was the one that Dino heard?
Guest:No, he heard the Time Twins.
Guest:It was a more obscure thing, but it was very, very full of adventure in the sonics, and that's what he responded to.
Marc:Oh, that's right, right.
Marc:So you were making a couple of hits.
Marc:You worked with the Canadian acts, and then Eno, he sort of shifted your attention to something more specific that became sort of a creatively life-changing event, I imagine.
Guest:Yeah, I had never felt what I felt with him, and I thought, okay, I have reason to trust this man, and I love what he's doing, and I decided that I would never do anything I don't want to do again.
Marc:What was it about him?
Marc:I mean, you know, obviously, I mean, it's interesting to me that, you know, your your core sort of love of melody.
Marc:And I think that, you know, has that as well.
Marc:Aside from, you know, what he's known for as a producer, the ambient records are not necessarily melody driven songs.
Marc:like his earlier records, but it does seem that he, when you talk about your recorder, what is the penny whistle, that many of his early albums were kind of fun and romping and almost the melodies could have been penny whistle melodies, that he had an appreciation for those simple melodies.
Guest:Eno's a good singer and he came up singing and so he always had an appreciation for the center of the picture that way.
Guest:I was able to help him make those records because not only was I a good technician, I was musical so, you know, maybe I had more music education than him because he had come from art school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was able to speed things along for him, move the process along according to his vision.
Guest:And he appreciated that I was playing a good supporting role to him getting to where he wanted to get to.
Marc:What was the first Eno album that you did with him?
Marc:It wasn't that Harold Budd, was it?
Marc:Or it was?
Guest:Yeah, it was that Harold Budd one called Plateau of Mirror.
Marc:Yeah, I have that record.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I have the John Hassel records, too.
Marc:Did you work with the John Hassel, too?
Guest:I made three John Hassel records, yeah.
Marc:And what was the Eno solo record that you worked on?
Guest:Well, then we went on to do another Harold Budd record called The Pearl, and then we did one called Apollo.
Guest:And Apollo was the one that I was more involved with because I played some, get back the steel guitar here, I played some steel guitar on Apollo.
Guest:In fact, there's one track on there called Deep Blue Day that shows up in the Trainspotting movie.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And also, like, it brought something to Eno.
Marc:Like, was that like, did you just suggest that to him?
Marc:Because I think that's like the fourth or third or fourth ambient record.
Marc:And up to that point, you know, it seemed like mostly in my memory to be synthesizers.
Marc:And then on that record.
Marc:Like those last few cuts are just sort of like, you know, I can, you know, the slide takes center stage and, you know, it introduces something entirely new into Eno sound.
Marc:What was the discussions around that, around you saying like, lay down some country riffs in this ambient idea here?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, the Apollo record was meant to be a soundtrack for a documentary on the space missions, the Apollo.
Guest:That's why it's called Apollo.
Guest:And the astronauts were listening to country music when they were in outer space.
Guest:So we decided we would add, I said, well, I got a steel guitar in the closet.
Guest:Maybe we can add a little bit of twang that might relate to the film.
Guest:And that's how it started.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Was it a steel guitar or a lap steel?
Marc:Was it a pedal or lap steel?
Guest:It was a pedal steel.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I had a little showbun pedal steel.
Guest:I still have it here.
Guest:I don't know if you can see it in the camera.
Marc:I see it right there, yeah, right behind you.
Marc:Yeah, that gold one.
Marc:Look at that thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So after doing all that stuff with Eno, you guys developed some sort of shorthand around how you worked together and how you produced together?
Guest:Yeah, we always got results fast.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, I was quick with the, you know, I was quick in the studio and quick to come up with a part and everything always came our way quickly.
Guest:And so we weren't scratching our heads or running into roadblocks, you know.
Marc:That's interesting that it happens quickly, but the sound that you're creating is quite spacious.
Marc:You would never think that anything was moving too fast.
Marc:during the ambient records.
Marc:No, no, no.
Guest:Tempos aren't there.
Guest:Well, the processings were quick because we developed this technique.
Guest:Because in most recording studios, people, up to that point, people were listening to their effects almost as a sidebar to the main components.
Guest:And you might have a reverb on a vocal...
Guest:as you're working along and then when you finally mix you would go back to that and recreate what you were most excited about but we had a technique whereby we those those effects were not just showing up as a temporary sound in the blend they were yeah they were
Guest:assigned to a stereo pair ready to be printed all the time.
Guest:So if we got lucky and we hit on something that was really cool, I would just press record and we printed the sound effects, which would then allow us to treat those as instruments and send them back to the effects again.
Guest:And so we just kept...
Guest:adding to the chain of effects.
Guest:And eventually we hit on these quite radical sounds for that time.
Guest:And that's how we hit on a lot of those real spacious, those octave sounds and those celestial sounds, let's call them.
Guest:And I got hooked on that.
Guest:So we never treated our processing as something that you just have as a convenience along the way, but we treated them like the sounds that were the most important.
Marc:And it's interesting because those sounds that you guys came upon are always sort of hovering in almost all of your records that you do for other people.
Marc:It's sort of like, what's that in the background?
Marc:That's just a space sound.
Guest:Yeah, we got pretty good at it.
Guest:I have continued with it.
Guest:I've even gotten better at it in modern times.
Guest:I found a way to finally... Because the problem with...
Guest:And reverbs and long textural sounds, they can bleed over chord changes and really screw things up.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Marc:Oh, right, right.
Marc:And then it almost sounds out of tune.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, you know, let's say you've got a chord that's a semitone up from the root chord.
Guest:And if the root chord carries on with the reverb, then it's a train wreck.
Guest:So I found a way of dealing with it now where as the chord change happened, then the textures also shift harmonically so you don't get the bleeding effect.
Guest:I mean, it's getting into pretty technical stuff here.
Marc:No, but it explains a lot.
Marc:I noticed even on your first solo album, and I haven't listened to this new album, that you found out a way to blend these aural elements that you sort of perfected with Eno and
Marc:with something more almost acoustic.
Marc:So there's this weird mixture of something where you put an instrument up front in a very clean way, and it sort of moves around with each instrument.
Marc:But the bed of sort of celestial echo kind of is always present, creating another texture, but it doesn't take away from this almost analog nature of some of the instruments you put up front.
Guest:That's because those textures are not just a reverb system.
Guest:They are samples of the front sound pushed back into the multitrack and laid in in such a way that they provide harmonic backing to the front melody.
Guest:And that's your magic, Daniel.
Guest:That's the trick right there, right?
Guest:It's part of the new trick right there.
Guest:It's very dub-driven.
Guest:We call it dubs now, sort of.
Guest:Yeah, we've gotten pretty good at it.
Guest:It's great, man.
Marc:And it's like in like, OK, so after the after you and, you know, make these discoveries.
Marc:So how does it happen that you produce like the biggest U2 record that, you know, ever existed and arguably probably one of the the biggest U2.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, I guess you did Unforgettable Fire first, which was pretty fucking big.
Marc:Why did you guys, because I know that Eno had been producing people, John Cale and some other folks, but how did you two happen?
Guest:While we were working on, I think, let's say the Apollo record in Hamilton, Eno got an invitation sent in from his office, and the invitation was, well, there's this young Irish man that would love to have him produce that record.
Guest:And he said, I'm not at all interested in producing anymore.
Guest:I don't want to produce anybody.
Guest:And he was living at my house at the time.
Marc:In Hamilton?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're just living with Brian Eno in Hamilton?
Marc:Like, I'm sorry, my memories of that city.
Marc:I mean, I think at that time it was probably still like it was a little beat up when I was just there.
Marc:So it's hard for me to picture it in its heyday, but it must have been.
Marc:It was pleasant.
Marc:He was just hanging out at your house.
Marc:Was he hiding?
Guest:Nobody knew who he was.
Guest:We worked in the day in the studio, and then we drove to my house at night and listened to our mixes and partied a little bit.
Guest:It was a lot of fun in those days.
Guest:We had a nice spot on the mountains, away from the factories.
Guest:It was nice.
Guest:They sent a demo tape, and I said, well, let's at least listen to the tape.
Guest:let's listen to these guys and uh i put on the tape and yeah i thought what wait a minute the singer's got something he can really hit the high notes yeah i was like yeah this seems to be kind of a vibe here right he said no no i'm not interested i said well listen i'm trying to get a foot in the door in this in this world of producing at this point i said why don't you introduce me and i'll produce the record
Guest:he said well i don't know if we can pull that off yeah but anyhow we we got talked into going to dublin to meet the guys and with the the ploy was you know is going to introduce me he walks and i make the record
Guest:Yeah, that was the idea because he was trying to help me out.
Guest:We were good friends.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:And well, there we found ourselves in a car crunched up in the back.
Guest:The whole band in one car, me and Eno.
Guest:And Bono did it.
Guest:They played some tracks they were working on, and Bono stopped shouting in the car because he's really good at convincing people.
Guest:And before we knew it, he convinced Eno that we were going to do it.
Guest:All together?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Bono hustled you guys.
Marc:He turned on the charm.
Marc:That's right, yeah.
Marc:It worked.
Marc:But that seemed to start something, I mean, maybe for you and maybe for Eno as well, that to sort of apply...
Marc:The things that you guys were discovering in the studio that was, you know, I mean, I would say not not it's not that it's not accessible, but it's, you know, a very small audience, you know, for what some of this stuff that you know is doing.
Marc:So now you have this opportunity to apply these techniques and these sounds that you guys are discovering to, you know, what is, you know, a mainstream act.
Marc:So what was the negotiation?
Marc:How did you deliberate that?
Guest:They wanted to bring Eno in because they knew that he'd have a fresh way of looking at things.
Guest:They didn't want to make the same record they had just made before.
Guest:They wanted to move on.
Guest:We took a lot of our atmospherics and our celestial sonics to Dublin.
Guest:And so it was kind of the next stage.
Guest:That's why Unforgettable Fire has a...
Guest:has a lot of texture to it because we we were excited about that technique that I described to you right right and so we were able to apply that to what they were doing right and they dug it they dug it and you know the it was a bit of a thing that was happening
Guest:Already, you know, the Simple Minds had New Gold Dream, which was a little bit, was quite panoramic sonically in itself.
Guest:And they were peers.
Guest:And so that record was a point of reference for us.
Guest:And so they welcome the textures.
Guest:And so that's why that record went in that direction, because we were able to export from Canada to Ireland.
Yeah.
Marc:So that was sort of caught in that almost bordering on goth-ish new wave thing.
Guest:Yeah, it had goth in it.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:But after we finished The Unforgettable Fire, I said to The Edge that I thought we had something left to say.
Guest:And so if he wanted to invite me back in, then I think we could do another great record.
Guest:And then we did The Joshua Tree.
Marc:But in between that, you did a Peter Gabriel record.
Marc:You worked with Eno's, is that Eno's brother?
Guest:Well, the Peter Gabriel record, Peter called me because he had heard the ambient records.
Guest:He had heard the Harold Bunn records.
Guest:And he was doing a soundtrack for a film called Birdie with Alan Parker.
Guest:I was brought in to kind of weird things up a little bit to do a soundtrack.
Yeah.
Guest:I really liked it.
Guest:He had a nice studio in the country.
Guest:It was just an old converted cow barn.
Guest:And he took me in this vault.
Guest:He said, well, it was just a bunch of two inch tapes from his past work.
Guest:He says, go through any of this stuff, pull out anything you want from the shelves.
Guest:And if you if you bump into something that you want to weird up and, you know, that you think might have some kind of a.
Guest:might apply to the soundtrack, then by all means.
Guest:So that's it.
Guest:I just kept taking two-inch tapes off the shelf.
Guest:And I played them, and I'd find some... I'd slow something down and pick out a melody.
Guest:So I surprised Peter with a whole bag of things that were new to him because I had changed the face of them, you might say.
Marc:You weirded them up.
Marc:I weirded them up.
Marc:But then you made a huge record with them.
Guest:Well, after that, he said, well, why don't you stick around and make my song record?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because, you know, the going was good.
Guest:You know, we were getting somewhere.
Guest:And I said, okay.
Guest:And that was that.
Guest:We went off and did, you know, a record called So, which had Sledgehammer on it and In Your Eye.
Marc:Huge record.
Guest:Huge record for Peter.
Marc:So now you're a guy.
Guest:You're a big... Now you're a producer.
Guest:You're in, man.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I was...
Guest:My manager at the time was dragging me through every office in New York, and all the doors were open to me.
Marc:Here's the guy that weirds things up.
Marc:It's working.
Marc:It's awesome, man.
Marc:I love that you still make time to do your own work and also get a couple of John Hassel records in there.
Guest:Yeah, the John Hassel records are far out.
Guest:I heard one of them somewhat recently, and I was really impressed.
Guest:My goodness, we went deep.
Marc:The fourth world music.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Did you do the one where there was one that blew my fucking mind when I was in college?
Marc:I guess it was probably 82, and it was one where there was water being used.
Guest:Water slapping, pygmy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's right, yeah.
Guest:You did that record?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, man.
Marc:Did that record.
Marc:Oh, man, that changed my life.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:Like, I had one of those, it was a drugless astral projection experience.
Marc:I was sitting in my room, my dorm room, listening to that through big speakers, and I left my body.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, oh, good.
Guest:But the water slapping thing, like... Yeah, exactly, man.
Guest:Yeah, and then we went the distance with it, and I pulled out all the stops, and we had this great sound on John's trumpet.
Guest:We were excited about this harmonizer at the time, which gave it... Right, with these weird kind of... Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What were those?
Guest:Yeah!
Guest:His tone was like that to begin with because he didn't blow the trumpet hard.
Guest:He had found some way of playing very softly.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he kept this little Indian tuning instrument right by him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:A little tambour.
Guest:It was always... It's not on the record, but it's right by him as his point of reference for pitch.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then I had him mic'd real close.
Guest:And then on the...
Guest:We had this box called the AMS Harmonizer, and we dialed up a sound a fourth above.
Guest:So for every note that he played, he had a harmony up above him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That blew my mind, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm so glad I made those records.
Guest:And it seemed normal to me at the time, but when I heard it back recently, I thought, oh, my goodness.
Guest:Nothing's like that.
Guest:Nothing's like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:To this day.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Absolutely, man.
Marc:And it's just just great.
Marc:OK, so you talk to Edge.
Marc:He brings you back for Joshua Tree.
Marc:And that was you and Brian again or mostly you?
Guest:That was me and Brian again.
Guest:We decided to do tag team work.
Guest:I did two weeks, you know, did two weeks.
Marc:Now, let me ask you a question, a personal question.
Marc:Now, not personal, but it struck me on listening to that record that some of the melodies were definitely either yours or Brian's or both, that they didn't come with the band.
Guest:Well, I think at that point they were appreciating that we were able to have musical input into their work.
Guest:I'm not saying we wrote the songs or anything, but we were able to suggest a melodic direction that... It definitely felt like you guys.
Marc:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but that's right.
Guest:That's a very, well, that's a Celtic melody, but it's also a penny whistle melody.
Guest:Part of the success of that record, I mean, once the songs were done, we did our own harmony singing.
Guest:So it was always Eno, Edge, and myself.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, because we didn't want to bring in any outside singers.
Guest:You know, there might have been better singers down the road, let's say.
Guest:But we wanted to keep it in-house because there's some... I think people really feel that in-house feeling, you know, when you don't go outside of the immediate talent of the band.
Guest:And we were...
Guest:honorary members of the band at that point.
Guest:And so we did all our own background singing.
Guest:And I think the soul of that record is partly due to that.
Guest:But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.
Guest:But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.
Guest:You know the harmonies.
Guest:Eno's a great singer, by the way.
Guest:Eno's a great singer.
Marc:Yeah, and there you go.
Marc:There's that gospel layering.
Guest:Yep, there it is.
Guest:I think that song...
Guest:I might have whispered something in Bono's ear about a direction.
Guest:It might have been a little more soul music driven.
Guest:It was a territory that he had not visited before because they had come up as a punk band.
Guest:So they wouldn't have wanted to sound like the soul records that I grew up with because Hamilton's near Buffalo and Detroit.
Guest:So I heard all the Motown stuff coming up as a kid.
Guest:So that was obviously part of my upbringing and part of my musical fiber.
Guest:And so I think I whispered something in his ear and was probably just something that was derived from the soul music time.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I do want to ask you a quick question about the Robbie Robertson record.
Marc:He sort of integrated, if I remember that record a bit...
Marc:And also, you know, I remember I had a long conversation with Robbie.
Marc:Was there a conscious effort to integrate some of his native heritage into the texture of that recording?
Guest:We never talked about his native background as a tonality that should be on the record.
Guest:We just got on with it.
Guest:Robbie had a whole batch of songs ready to roll when I met him.
Guest:And we recorded some of those, but new songs came along.
Guest:And I think that's where... Because I was very looking forward to working with him because he was a generation ahead of me and a hero of mine because we grew up in the same neck of the woods.
Guest:He was a trailblazer and went south and discovered a lot about American music.
Guest:And so I really wanted to be in the arena with him.
Guest:But I think he appreciated that he was working with a Canadian.
Guest:And I brought a Canadian fellow along with me named Bill Dillon, who's a great guitar player from Hamilton.
Guest:And so we had a little bit of, even though he was not working with his mates from the band at that point, we had a little mini band because...
Guest:Because he had me and he had Bill Dillon.
Guest:It's weird that three Canadians were there in the trenches together.
Guest:It was very nice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think I was able to get to certain places emotionally with Robbie that I'm not suggesting that he had forgotten about that.
Guest:But he was living in Los Angeles.
Guest:And we were just coming fresh from Canada.
Guest:So we had that naive searching spirit there.
Guest:and so i think i i woke up that part of robbie again and then we were able to get on with some other songs you know that uh fallen angel for example his mate had just passed and um and so what um i think it was richard manual uh had terrible had passed and uh so that's what fallen angel was about and we're able to
Guest:really align emotionally.
Guest:And so I think it's not specifically native, the tones that we bumped into, but I think they're quite regional and quite concentrated in the area where we came from.
Guest:So I think that was an interesting emotional contribution to Robbie's work at that time.
Marc:Yeah, I remember listening to it a lot at the time.
Marc:Now, let's talk about Dylan a bit, because I recently listened to Oh Mercy a couple of times.
Marc:The first time I didn't realize it was you, and then I realized, I was like, oh, this is the beginning of this thing with this guy.
Marc:So, on Oh Mercy, what was the understanding between you and Bob in terms of how he wanted that record to be?
Guest:He had stopped into the studio when I was making Neville Brothers record.
Guest:He was touring in New Orleans and he stopped in and we played him a few tracks from that.
Guest:And he was impressed with the setting because we had built a custom studio for the Neville's around the corner from.
Marc:What did you do differently with the Neville's?
Marc:that they had not really done?
Marc:Because I don't know that record.
Guest:Well, we just, I decided to just have the studio around, right at the end of the street from where they lived.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:And I just built the studio for them.
Guest:It was not a commercial studio.
Guest:And I think they appreciated that it was...
Guest:It was all kind of happening live in one room.
Guest:We didn't have isolation and all that.
Guest:And I think we got to a very soulful place quite quickly with the Nevels.
Guest:And we had cut a couple of Bob's songs.
Guest:We had cut God on Our Side.
Guest:And I played him our version of God on Our Side with Aaron Nevel singing.
Guest:Very beautiful rendition, very powerful emotionally.
Guest:And at the end of it, Bob said, that sounds like a record.
Guest:It was a big compliment from Bob.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And played him a couple of other things, and he said, well, how should we work, Daniel?
Guest:I said, well, we could do it in New Orleans.
Guest:I said, when are you available?
Guest:He says, well, I'm available in the spring, which is three months away.
Guest:I said, well, come down.
Guest:You don't have to bring a band or anything.
Guest:Just show up with your songs.
Guest:You don't even need any instruments.
Guest:I'll have the whole thing set up.
Guest:At this point, I...
Guest:I rented a new house specifically for the Bob record.
Guest:In New Orleans.
Guest:In New Orleans.
Guest:And it was a very private setting.
Guest:We set up in a kitchen, really.
Guest:And...
Guest:And, you know, I sat next to Bob and we played our guitars and I had a Roland 808, which is a beatbox, like a little hip hop beatbox.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I didn't have a band in the room.
Guest:We'd cut everything to the Roland 808.
Guest:I just fed that through a wedge in front of him.
Guest:So I had a little bit of a singing on stage feeling.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:But it was very private, and I was determined to get the center of the record in a very strong position before having other people on it.
Guest:I wanted the words, Bob's vocal, and the songs to be powerful and clear.
Guest:And so we concentrated on the Rolling 808, Bob's playing and singing, and my playing along with him.
Guest:So that's most of the record, just the two of us, and then we added stuff on top.
Marc:Really?
Marc:So that's an intimate experience.
Guest:Very much so.
Guest:I had visited Bob at his place prior to all this to listen to some of the songs, and he already had a song called Most of the Time.
Guest:That song kills me.
Guest:That's the fucking song on that record, buddy.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:It kills me, too, when I hear it.
Guest:And it's interesting because getting back to textural work now, I overdubbed a quartet on that, what would normally be a string quartet.
Guest:I did it with four Les Pauls.
Guest:Four Les Pauls, single note performances that I played.
Guest:My Vox amp up to 10...
Guest:And so most of the clear focus, most of the almost playing, taking the role of a cello, let's say.
Guest:Then the next one, I'll play the role of the viola.
Guest:Next one, I'll be the violin and then maybe the contrabass.
Guest:And so what you hear in the background as a texture is four less palm parts.
Guest:What?
Guest:And it sounds like a string quartet, but it's not, obviously.
Guest:But we had the advantage of fixed time because we cut it to the roll in 808.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Almost an early hip-hop beat, really.
Guest:And then we had Willie Green, who played drums with the Neville Brothers.
Guest:He lived around the corner, so he came over and overdubbed the drums.
Guest:Most of the...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of the world's greatest funk drummers now playing on most of the time.
Guest:But because I had fixed time, I was able to apply an echo.
Guest:So if you hear the drums, they sound really haunting and deep, but kind of hip-hop.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:On a song that's not meant to be hip-hop at all.
Marc:It's a real heartbreaker.
Yeah.
Guest:And I overdubbed the bass after.
Marc:Wow, the Les Paul trip.
Marc:That's an amazing story.
Marc:Different guitars or one Les Paul overdubbed, overdubbed, overdubbed?
Guest:Same Les Paul.
Guest:I think I got it here somewhere.
Marc:So it seems to me that the other record, the Time Out of Mind record, when I heard that, that was, I think, the first time I really acknowledged or knew about you and that you had brought the sound to this thing.
Marc:And when that record came out, I thought like, well, the reason this is amazing is this guy, Lenoir, has figured out that this is the beginning of the tunnel for Bob.
Marc:He's moving towards the light, man.
Guest:Well, at that time, I had rented an old Mexican theater in Cinema House in Oxnard, California, which is an hour north of L.A.
Guest:And so that's where my shop was.
Guest:And Bob came down there to do some demos.
Guest:And that was the beginning of the time out of mind sound.
Guest:But I had met Bob in New York prior to that.
Guest:But prior to Oh Mercy, you mean?
Guest:No.
Guest:In between.
Guest:Yeah, but prior to him coming to the, it was called the Teatro, the place in Oxnard.
Yeah.
Marc:And that's where Willie recorded, too, one there?
Guest:That's correct, yes.
Guest:And Emmylou, too?
Guest:Yeah, Emmylou, that's right.
Guest:And then the soundtrack for Sling Blade.
Guest:It was a great shot.
Marc:So you were in New Orleans for how long?
Guest:Too long.
Guest:15 years.
Marc:But that was where you drew a lot of creativity from that place.
Marc:So you come to Oxnard, and was it the theater that drew you in?
Marc:I mean, there's nothing great about Oxnard.
Guest:Yeah, I was just driving on the PCH with a friend listening to records, and I saw the cinema that was for lease.
Guest:I thought, oh, that looks pretty good.
Guest:It's obviously an old place, you know, been closed down for a while.
Guest:And we looked up the owner, and that's it.
Guest:We rented that place.
Guest:I was there for about five years.
Guest:But prior to that, Bob had...
Guest:Played me, had read me all the lyrics to Time Out of Mind in a hotel room in New York.
Guest:And I didn't hear a note.
Guest:He just read the lyrics.
Guest:He said, what do you think, Daniel?
Guest:Have we got a record?
Guest:I said, yeah, we got a record.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he said, there's records I want you to listen to.
Guest:And he gave me a bunch of old blues records to listen to.
Guest:Some of them I was already familiar with.
Marc:Like what?
Guest:Oh, you know, some Little Walter and Charlie Patton.
Guest:All the way back.
Guest:Old records that he was very fond of in the way that they had a sound of urgency in them.
Guest:Ah.
Guest:And there was not a bunch of studio trickery.
Guest:And...
Guest:I listened to these records, and I went to a friend of mine's place, a fellow by the name of Tony Mangurian in New York, and he's a drummer, and I play a bit of percussion and drums myself.
Guest:We overdubbed on top of these records, just played along with them.
Guest:And then we took the records away and just listened to our toppings, and the toppings had similar groups.
Guest:So things like... We chose the best eight bars here, 16 bars there, four bars, and we made loops.
Guest:Because I knew that Bob was about to make a blues-based record, and I didn't want to be...
Guest:The problem with making a blues bass record is you might sound like a bar band.
Guest:And a lot of things had already been done with the blues.
Marc:Tricky with blues, right?
Marc:Tricky.
Marc:Anyone can play it.
Guest:Well, you could hit the tarp bit pretty quick playing the blues if you don't get it right.
Guest:So I came in with these prepared loops.
Guest:when we did Time Out of Mind, as an insurance policy, that if things got a little too regular, a little too normal, I could pull out the loops and ask the drummers to play along with the loops.
Guest:So Time Out of Mind has loops in it that Keltner and Brian Blade played along with.
Marc:Huh.
Marc:It just felt to me like the shift in his...
Marc:It was not so much a reinvention, but it was sort of some kind of weird, profound acknowledgement of his mortality to me.
Guest:I felt that when he read the lyrics.
Guest:I felt that there was a deep, deep melancholy and almost like sadness and maybe even regret in there.
Guest:It was just so... It was dripping in...
Guest:In history.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:His own history.
Guest:And I thought, wow, this could be really something, you know.
Marc:It was a great record.
Marc:It's so interesting you say that about the blues because I like to play blues myself.
Marc:But you realize that like this is a great music, but anyone can do it and anyone can do it OK.
Guest:You know, so, you know, what do you do with it?
Guest:It's traditional music at this point, you know.
Guest:And so we had to, you know, the term I like to use, we have to fly over the cuckoo's nest of average blues because I didn't want to make just something regular that Bob's singing on top of.
Guest:But he had the wisdom to bring in Augie Myers and Jim Dickinson, two great keyboard players.
Guest:Augie's from, it's more Tex-Mex, and he does that backbeat, dun-dun-dun.
Guest:it's just a combo organ through a super reverb yeah and it's got that stabbing sound yeah and dickinson from memphis was um he was in a whole other dimension because it was a very advanced uh almost orchestral player you know with that kind of knowledge so he was able to
Guest:supply us with these cascading celestial complex emotional sounds and you're playing in that theater so that that's a whole other instrument to add that well we did the demos in the theater but we cut most of it in miami okay interesting why miami i had the best piano sound there at the theater you know i had my beautiful old steinway b and it rebuilt and bob sounded great on it
Guest:And then Bob came in one day.
Guest:He says, Dan, it came to me that we need to record in Miami.
Guest:I said, Miami, what are you talking about?
Guest:Why don't we just do it here?
Guest:He said, no, no, we got to go to Miami.
Yeah.
Guest:So we packed up all this shit and drove a truckload full of instruments and equipment to Miami, and we recorded the bulk of it, Criteria, in Miami, and then came back to finish it at Oxnard.
Marc:Why did he want to go to Miami?
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:I just didn't.
Guest:I wasn't about to question him.
Guest:Maybe he was trying to get away from his kids or something.
Marc:You can't argue with him.
Marc:Bob needs to go to Miami.
Guest:I guess we're going to Miami.
Guest:Yeah, we went to Miami, all right.
Guest:But I got to like the studio in Miami.
Guest:They were very accommodating people, and Bob doesn't like to discuss anything in front of the band, so we'd go out in the parking lot and decide what the approach would be on the next song.
Guest:So I liked our little gathering, our little get-togethers in the parking lot.
Guest:We talked about standing in the doorway crying like a fool.
Guest:That was a little melody that I provided Bob with.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That one.
Guest:And I said to Bob, I always loved the groove on Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:You know, Bob, I don't want to go back to what you did before, but I got to tell you, that has always touched me as a...
Guest:as a time signature and as a pedestal for lyric.
Guest:And so he said, okay, well, I think we can cut it in that 6-4.
Guest:So we went in after the parking lot discussion.
Guest:We went in and cut it, and I had that little melody.
Guest:It's a little classic.
Guest:I love that song.
Marc:So it seems like you guys had a pretty good thing going.
Guest:You only get so much of Bob's time.
Guest:So you've got to roll fast.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had a big band.
Guest:There was 11 people in the room.
Guest:So that can be good or bad.
Guest:You get a lot of sound fast, but if it goes wrong, then it's a hardship to redirect.
Yeah.
Marc:So let's talk about like more specifically now before we wrap up is that it seems that your solo stuff, you kind of go all around a little bit.
Guest:Well, you know, I have broad taste, and I like solo steel guitar, and I've done some instrumentals that I stand by.
Guest:And the dub stuff?
Guest:And the dub stuff.
Guest:You know, my studio experimentations, they never stop.
Marc:And the Venetian snares one, I got that, and I was like, what's this about, man?
Marc:Daniel Lois doing this, and I'm like, what is this?
Marc:What is going on here?
Marc:Who are the Venetian snares?
Yeah.
Guest:yeah venetian snares record i i love the we made two albums uh kind of a double album and i think it's some of some of my best sonic work um yeah it's all sonic man he's a great uh canadian artist from from out west and so we you know we teamed up and hit it off and and off we went it's very very far out and yeah um
Guest:And I played it to Bono.
Guest:He said, why didn't you do the new Blade Runner with this?
Guest:I said, well, nobody called me.
Guest:He's getting you some soundtrack work.
Guest:But the track that you got sent is from a new body of work under the name of Heavy Sun.
Marc:It's got a little Latin vibe to it.
Guest:It's got a little Latin vibe to it, and the rest of the record segues into some gospel tonalities that I like a lot.
Guest:A lot of great harmony singing on the record.
Guest:So I'm very pleased about that because I hadn't really done four-part harmony for a long time.
Guest:Oh, great.
Guest:So this record called Heavy Sun will have that.
Guest:We've got a single coming out in January called Power.
Guest:And so I think you'll like that.
Guest:I'll have to send you the whole album, Mark, after we hang up here.
Guest:That'd be great, man.
Marc:And your health's okay?
Marc:You feeling all right?
Marc:I know you got into a wreck a while, a few years back.
Guest:Yeah, I had a motorcycle crash in L.A., but I'm good.
Guest:Thanks for asking.
Guest:Yeah, I got, you know, you can die from that.
Guest:I broke 10 bones.
Guest:Yeah, geez.
Guest:Wouldn't wish that upon anyone.
Guest:But I'm good.
Guest:Thanks for asking.
Guest:I've moved into some piano work.
Guest:I'm playing more piano now than I ever have.
Guest:Margaret Marison, who I work with, she likes my piano playing.
Guest:She says, why don't you make a piano record?
Guest:I love your touch and your sound.
Guest:So over the holidays here, that's what I'm doing up here in Toronto.
Guest:I got a couple of nice pianos in my apartment and some nice ones here in the studio.
Guest:So I might have a piano record coming up.
Guest:it's great the songs are always there the music is always there it never stops and it's bleeding together more than ever mark you know there was a time well are you producing are you making a solo record well it's all intertwined now and that's what's great about the modern world that we can do things spontaneously and have them come out i've i've invented this little banner that i'm going to operate under for the next four years called the maker series
Guest:and uh whatever i do will come out under that that little heading and uh what label it's gonna be on e1 out of toronto okay one uh nice people doing everything out of toronto right now feels kind of nice you're home man yeah man i gotta i'm surrounded by people i admire um
Guest:I work with Wayne Lorenz, my co-producer in all the new work.
Guest:And he's an old friend.
Guest:He stands by me, puts up with me.
Guest:And, you know, he's driven by the right values.
Guest:And it's nice to be reminded of that.
Guest:No matter what goes on in my life, I want to be driven by the right values when it comes to that music.
Guest:Which are what?
Guest:excellent try and make masterpieces and don't let anything slip on through because for some kind of industry pressure or anything like that or trend pressure or anything whatever we touch we try and have it be the very best we can do
Marc:Except it goes back to Eno.
Marc:You're never going to do something you don't want to do again.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Yeah, man.
Guest:And how is that with you?
Guest:You've done a lot of things.
Marc:Yeah, I'm not doing anything I don't want to do.
Marc:Sometimes I'm not even doing things I kind of want to do.
Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I'll take it as a compliment if you choose the people you like to have a conversation with.
Guest:I appreciate you asking questions about me and my childhood and everything.
Guest:We should have said more about you, Mark.
Marc:Oh, it's okay.
Marc:I talk about me all the time, Daniel.
Marc:It's an honor to talk to you, and it was great to meet you, and I'm a big fan, and I was always sort of enchanted by your work with yourself and with others, and the high point for me was that John Hassel moment, buddy.
Marc:I mean, that was...
Marc:I'm going to go into my house and listen to that fucking record right now.
Marc:Yeah, man.
Marc:Get high without drugs.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Take care of yourself, man.
Marc:It was great talking to you.
Marc:Thank you, Mark.
Marc:Okay, huh?
Marc:Eno stories, Dylan stories, Bono, it's... That guy, man.
Marc:He's the real thing and he's his own thing.
Marc:Love it.
Marc:Daniel Lenoir has the new album Heavy Sun coming out this spring.
Marc:And you can check out the single, the first single, Under the Heavy Sun, wherever you listen to music.
Marc:Now I'm going to do some...
Marc:some sort of you know trebly barely controlled uh telecaster noise with a bit of echo in honor of our guest today
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and LaFondin.
Marc:There's cat angels everywhere, man.
Boomer lives.