Daniel Lanois – Solo Electro

Daniel Lanois is one of the most important innovators and producers in the history of both rock ’n’ roll and ambient music, his abiding interest in deep atmospherics providing the link between his indispensable work in those two realms. Through the ’80s and into the ’90s, Lanois and Brian Eno made a series of U2 masterpieces, Lanois’ panoramic vision of sound helping to separate U2 from their peers. In the late ’80s, he began working with a panoply of legends including Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Robbie Robertson, Neil Young, and Willie Nelson to make career-redefining masterworks, his love of bent sonics and spectral abstraction giving those artists proper gravity. But Lanois has never been content with one role or easy laurels. Having made The Pearl with Harold Budd and Apollo with Eno, the pedal steel adventurer and textural guitarist created several instrumental wonders of his own, including 2005’s gloriously abstract Belladonna and 2016’s guitar hymnal Goodbye to Language. Oh, and Lanois is an incredible songwriter, too, his “The Maker” having been covered by Emmylou Harris, Jerry Garcia, and Dave Matthews, an avowed fan who also covered the epochal “For The Beauty of Wynonna.” Lanois is a true musical polymath.

A key element of Lanois’ world is bending sound, of making it move in unexpected but somehow comforting ways, like a kind of Americana dub apostle. With its mutable strings, the pedal steel is a perfect vehicle for him, its uncanny sense of motion always blurring the focus just so. In this solo set, Lanois will indeed combine a pedal steel with a set of dub-rig effects. Lanois has a songwriter’s ear for melody, his lead lines on the instrument little earworms that feel like they have always existed. He has a producer’s ear for sound design, though, so that he renders those melodies in ways that feel like they have never existed. Lanois solo sets are rare events; Big Ears 2027 is delighted to host one at last, in addition to Lanois’ full-band set.