David Graham: People talk about the Lanois sound. What, to you, is your sound?

Daniel Lanois: Maybe in the ’80s it was more specific to a certain approach, when I was doing a lot of records with Eno. We did a lot of textural work and I was really just serving Brian and his vision with those records, but I really got hooked on my effects. Since then, things have evolved and I don’t use so much of that now. My recent record coming out in the fall called Goodbye to Language, I developed this system of taking samples of already existing components and extracting them from—putting them out of sync with the track and then doctoring them externally through other boxes, maybe changing them to slow them down, and if I hit on something special then I go back in and find a spot for that special sound back into the track. It won’t work for most of the songs. I just run it randomly.

Graham: That sounds very time consuming.

Lanois: It’s very time consuming. It wouldn’t recommend it.

Graham: It seems to me you straddle music that’s really acoustic and stuff that’s very electronic. Do you see that as a gap?

Lanois: It’s certainly a duality, you know, the two worlds of electronica and hand-played instruments. I’ve always embraced electronics because I started as a kid with my studio, so I always had a high regard for that world. I like introducing a little bit of technology sometimes. Like a lot of people I have an array of beatboxes, and some of those are really cool. I still use my little—I call it the Timmy Thomas drum beat. Timmy Thomas had a hit called “Why Can’t We Live Together” out of Florida, I think that would have been the ’70s, I think he just used a beatbox on his organ—it must have been a Lowrey Organ. When Marvin Gaye did “Sexual Healing,” I already had a Roland 808, so it was very reassuring to me that someone could build a hit song out of an electronic beatbox, and not even have real drums. Even on the ambient records that I did with Eno, that track, “Deep Blue Day,” which showed up in the Trainspotting movie, that was done on a little Suzuki Omnichord, a little toy instrument. It’s essentially an electronic autoharp. That’s what we used on the track, but we slowed it down a lot. The early Suzuki Omnichords had great basslines. And by slowing it down, it developed this beautiful, luxurious jukebox sound.

Graham: You were playing some electronic music last night, and I couldn’t quite tell what you were doing. Can you explain that?

Lanois: Oh, I just had a magic moment, because I just met Mad Professor, the Jamaican dub specialist out of England. I saw the Mad Professor about six years ago in Toronto, at a little place called the Great Hall that has a wraparound balcony, so I was on the balcony looking at him do his thing on the main floor about 10 feet from me. I was watching him and thought, “Oh! He’s got a little multitrack and a mixer and he’s including a track or not and then had some predetermined repeat echo settings,” and I thought, “This guy is having more fun than me! He’s taking the studio recordings of some quite famous Jamaican tracks and he’s dubbing them out on stage,” so I adapted his—if not specifically the music, then his technique. I just met him in the hallway, I was practically in tears. I thought, “Oh my goodness, a hero of mine.” So that’s what it is. It’s as simple as that. It’s little eight-track, sometimes we use 10 tracks. All the tracks are from the studio and then how I treat them on the night belongs to the night. It’s always a little bit different.