Daniel Lanois

We are currently living in the age of the superstar producer, with the likes of Avicii and Calvin Harris scoring worldwide hits under their own name and in some cases, singing with their own voices. It seems like quite a modern phenomenon but the truth of the matter is that there have always been big name producers, they were just purely confined to behind the mixing desk and not at the top of the charts. However, Daniel Lanois was cut from a different cloth. He might not have had the kind of success that Swedish House Mafia had in their prime but he was one of the first record producers to truly prove himself as a solo artist as well as a record producer.

Lanois was born in Hull, Quebec to a mother who was a singer and a father who played the violin. They separated when he was 12, so he and his brother Bob moved with their mother to Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. Lanois is one of the few record producers who actually started out as one and wanted to be one from the very beginning rather than falling into it after failing as a musician. Lanois took up playing guitar during his early teens, and as he improved on the instrument he would take what he wrote and record it onto a cheap cassette player with the help of his brother. By the age of 17, he and his brother had started their own recording studio in the laundry room of their mother’s house, and began recording as many local artists as they could possibly find.

However, with their experience writing as well as recording, the Lanois brothers would regularly aide their clients with songwriting and arranging, and because of that their reputation began to build. Soon, Daniel was able to buy a house and convert it into a full scale professional studio he dubbed Grant Avenue Studios. It was while he was running and recording in Grant Avenue that Lanois struck up a professional partnership with production legend Brian Eno. The two of them made an ambient record together which Eno was so satisfied with that when the time came for him to produce “The Unforgettable Fire”, the fourth album by some Irish no-hopers called U2, he called Lanois in to co-produce it.

After working with U2, Lanois was suddenly one of the most in-demand producers around. The rest of the 80’s saw him working with Peter Gabriel on his solo breakthrough “So”, Bob Dylan on his 1989 album “Oh Mercy”, which became widely regarded as Dylan’s best work in a decade, Robertson and U2 again for the album that saw them become the biggest band in the world, “The Joshua Tree”. By the end of the 1980’s, Lanois had moved to New Orleans from his native Canada, setting up his own Kingsway Studios and getting to work on his debut solo album, an album that became 1989’s “Acadie”.

Since then, his solo work has never seen the kind of commercial success that some of his charges have enjoyed. However, when you’ve produced the biggest album of its year three times, as he has done with the U2 albums “The Joshua Tree”, “Achtung Baby” and “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”, I’m sure you can live with that. To this day, Lanois is touring when he’s not recording either his own solo albums, film soundtracks or other bands, and he remains an unimpeachable talent when it comes to bringing out the best in other artists, and when it comes to writing his own music. He’s the man behind many of your favourite albums, and he still comes highly recommended.