Daniel Lanois
Heavy Sun
(eOne Music. 2021)
While Daniel Lanois isn’t well-known as a solo artist, in the past four decades he has become recognized as a renowned genius for imparting his alt-eclectic producing touch on high-profile projects.
After serendipitously catching Brian Eno’s attention with his homespun recording projects in the late ‘70s, the Quebec-born, Ontario-based Lanois mentored under the ambient/pop tastemaker, together developing sonic manipulation techniques and working with such off-the-radar experimental jazz artists as soft-pedal pianist Harold Budd and fourth-world trumpeter Jon Hassell. In 1985, Eno enlisted Lanois to co-produce U2’s breakthrough, The Unforgettable Fire, followed two years later with the band’s chart buster, Joshua Tree. In the meantime, Lanois found favor with Peter Gabriel, then a fringe art-pop artist, to helm 1986’s So. It jettisoned the singer/composer into superstardom. Of the event Gabriel says “One of the things I learned with Daniel Lanois is a total respect for the magic of the moment. When you have some spine-tingling event musically, you’ve got to capture it.”
With that same enchanting approach, Lanois transformed the career of Emmylou Harris with the hard-edged, rocking 1995 hit album, Wrecking Ball. Two years later, Lanois helped Bob Dylan navigate his first new music in seven years to record Time Out of Mind, marking the troubadour’s artistic comeback after a decade of declining popularity.
Throughout, the multi-instrumentalist Lanois has pursued his broad-taste solo career, beginning in 1989 with Acadie (Opal/Warner Bros.), a folksy atmospheric album sung in French and English. He went full-tilt ambient with 2010’s Flesh and Machines (ANTI-) inspired by Eno’s tonal music. That same year Lanois formed the roots combo Black Dub with vocalist Trixie Whitley, bassist Daryl Johnson, and drummer Brian Blade. Perhaps his most outrageous collaboration arrived with 2018’s Venetian Snares v Daniel Lanois (Timesig), an exploratory sound-clash improvisation with breakcore Venetian Snares (aka Aaron Funk). In the heavily edited sessions, Lanois delivered a melodic touch on pedal steel guitar.
With his latest project, Heavy Sun, Lanois says he’s entering a “new chapter” in his search for meaningful melodies. True to his character, he infuses the recording with innovative fire. Conceived during the dark and morbid pandemic, this eleven-song collection shimmers with 2021’s most affirmative music. Heavy Sun brings Lanois full circle to the spiritual musical environment he was brought up in— singing in the heaven-affirming church choir in Quebec where he learned the fundamentals of harmony while feasting on churchy organ records and recording in the basement of his Ontario home international gospel quartets who were traveling through the province. With Heavy Sun, he delivers a preternatural Americana fuse of classic gospel music, modern electronics, and swirling atmospherics.
Lanois assembled his Heavy Sun Orchestra (HSO) comprising guitarist Rocco Deluca, organist Johnny Shepherd, and bassist Jim Wilson, as well as guests such as Blade on some tunes. All four members sing, forming an intoxicating four-part gospel choir with call-and-response and echoing passages. Shepherd not only serves as the musical anchor on sanctuary organ, but also shines as the soul vocalist. Shepherd sounds like a Baptist preacher on the grooved “(Under the) Heavy Sun,” with its clipping beats, electronica spice, and the lyrics mirrored by the choir: “Come on we’re rolling down the road (It’s an open road)/Can’t hold us no more (With joy untold)/Ya, ya somebody dancing and somebody romancing, nothing but a joy (Heavy Sun).” It’s a song about freedom and spiritual longings, not typical of most pop music. This lyrical gem was the first single spun off the collection.
The tunes were written as a collective, with each HSO member improvising on the compositions. Then Lanois mixed them with his signature touches: ear-awakening synthesizer fillips and accentuations, yelping voicings, sliced guitar fills, organ shouts. Lanois layers to sonic perfection. Careful listeners will be rewarded.
Per agreement with all members, the songs had to convey a positive message. The soulful spin on “Dance On” (with a nod to the Isaac Hayes hit, “Do Your Thing”) ends with Shepherd counseling, “Whatever you do, don’t let nobody steal your joy from you.” The beat-driven anthem “Power” buoys with falsetto vocals and chants for peace and “a righteous stand.” The cooker, “Every Nation,” with Lanois taking the lead vocal, tells the story of the Mi’kmaq Nation in Nova Scotia seeking justice in the wake of broken treaties. The best outing comes with the thumping “Tree of Tule,” with a simple piano line, percussion energy, edgy organ electronica, and spacy swirls, about a traveler finding solace and shelter at the ancient El Arbol del Tule, a Montezuma cypress in Oaxaca, Mexico, which has the stoutest tree trunk in the world.
Another highlight is “Tumbling Stone,” set to a carnival organ beat and espousing the theme of Heavy Sun as a secular gospel record. From his pulpit, Shepherd sermonizes to pilgrims seeking salvation, that the goal is “to build a church with no walls,” with amens from the choir.
On the record, with images from darkness to light, from broken and lost to redeemed and found, Lanois serves up heavenly sonic fruit.
New York writer Dan Ouellette is the Radix music editor and author of Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes. He has written for Billboard, Downbeat, The New Yorker (Special Sections), JazzTimes and elsewhere. Currently he is working on his book, The Landfill Chronicles.
(A version of this review appears in the May 2021 Stereophile Magazine)