Daniel Lanois Trio

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.

Lanois’ trio with Jermaine Holmes and Jim Wilson allows him to explore a side of his career that, in spite of those famous fans, has often been overlooked: as a singer-songwriter and bandleader. With a glorious falsetto, the New Jersey-born Holmes was a member of D’Angelo’s The Vanguard who sang on Black Messiah; he remains a long-time member of Pete Rock’s Soul Brothers. Holmes is a drummer, too, with a generous pocket. And though Wilson is best known as a guitarist with Rollins Band and a collaborator to the likes of Sparks and Scott Ian, he is a soulful bassist and a terrific harmony singer. Bolstered by Holmes and Wilson, Lanois leans into his vibrato as a singer and his sense of misdirection as a guitarist, his solos often finding secret seams within his songs. Given his astounding career as a magician behind a mixing desk and a conjurer behind a pedal steel, it is a rare thrill to have Lanois step to the fore, his band at his side, and sing these songs of mystery and mythic romance.