Canadian producer and recording artist Daniel Lanois only started to gain broad recognition in 1984 with the release of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. Lanois co-produced that Triple Platinum album with Brian Eno, who was far better known at the time the album came out. However, Lanois was no rookie producer. After working on a few albums as an engineer (including for the Toronto-based children’s music singer/songwriter Raffi), Lanois accumulated more than a dozen production credits to his name over the course of six years.
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Once The Unforgettable Fire established Lanois as a “name” producer, it wasn’t long before he would work on some of the biggest albums of the ‘80s and ‘90s, including U2’s The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby and Peter Gabriel’s So and Us. In addition to making 11 solo albums, including the soundtrack for Sling Blade and the critically acclaimed Acadie and Shine, Lanois went on to produce dozens of albums after his mid-’80s commercial breakthrough.
Though Lanois is best-known for his work with U2 and Gabriel, he has produced many other artists over the course of his half-century-long production career. These seven are among the more notable artists he has produced.
Martha and the Muffins
By the time Lanois co-produced Martha and the Muffins’ 1981 album This Is the Ice Age, the Toronto-based band had already scored a Canadian Top-10 pop single and a U.S. dance hit with “Echo Beach.” Just before recording This Is the Ice Age, Martha and the Muffins got a new bass player, Jocelyne Lanois. She recommended her brother produce their next album, and This Is the Ice Age became Daniel Lanois’ first rock-album production credit.
This Is the Ice Age produced a Canadian Top-40 hit with “Women Around the World at Work,” and both that album and the Lanois-co-produced follow-up Danseparc (1983) peaked at No. 36 on Canada’s RPM album chart. The third and final album Lanois co-produced with members of Martha and the Muffins, Mystery Walk (1984), was the band’s most successful in the U.S. It reached No. 163 on the Billboard 200 and included the No. 2 dance hit “Black Stations/White Stations.”
Robbie Robertson
When Robbie Robertson released his self-titled debut album in October 1987, So and The Joshua Tree were still on the Billboard 200. The attention the album received paled compared to that received by the Gabriel and U2 megahits, but Robbie Robertson was no commercial slouch, reaching No. 38 on the Billboard’s flagship album chart. It didn’t hurt that the album featured all four members of U2, Gabriel and his rhythm section (bassist Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katché), and two of Robertson’s former bandmates from The Band, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko.
Bob Dylan
After U2 and Gabriel, Lanois’ production work with Bob Dylan stands out as his best-known. In following up the commercially and critically disappointing Down in the Groove (1988), Dylan had already recorded an album’s worth of material with The Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood. However, after Bono recommended he work with Lanois, Dylan decided to start anew. The resulting album was Oh Mercy, which was far better received than its predecessor. Eight years later, Dylan would reunite with Lanois to make Time Out of Mind, which is generally viewed as one of the folk-rock legend’s best albums.
Luscious Jackson
Fever In Fever Out (1996) is the only one of the five Luscious Jackson albums that Lanois co-produced. The album includes the band’s only Top-40 hit, “Naked Eye,” and it was by far their most commercially successful. Luscious Jackson guitarist Gabrielle Glaser told the Los Angeles Times part of the reason that they decided to work with Lanois was his history of recording albums in unusual locations. Most of Fever In Fever Out was recorded in the Manhattan apartment of drummer Kate Schellenbach. Lanois also brought in Emmylou Harris to provide backing vocals on three tracks. One year earlier, he had produced Harris’ album Wrecking Ball.
Dashboard Confessional
Lanois decided to retire from producing after he and Eno co-produced U2’s 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. However, when one of Lanois’ friends gave him a demo from Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, he was intrigued by what he heard and would soon find himself back in the studio. Lanois would ultimately wind up getting production credits for only two of the 12 tracks from the 2006 album Dusk and Summer. Don Gilmore produced the remainder, including the chart singles “Don’t Wait” and “Stolen.”
Neil Young
Neil Young hired Lanois to work on his 2010 album Le Noise after having watched videos of the producer working on his side project Black Dub. (Le Noise is also a play on Lanois’ name.) The album’s songs consist solely of Young on electric and acoustic guitars and vocals. Included among the eight tracks is an electric version of “Hitchhiker,” which Young recorded as an acoustic song in 1976 and released on the album of the same name in 2017. Le Noise was nominated for the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Rock Album, and “Angry World” won for Best Rock Song.
Brandon Flowers
Concurrent to making Le Noise, Lanois was one of four producers to work on Brandon Flowers’ first solo album Flamingo. Lanois co-produced five of the 10 tracks for The Killers’ vocalist, including the album’s third single “Jilted Lovers & Broken Hearts,” and he co-wrote all but one of those five songs. Additionally, Lanois played guitar, pedal steel, and Ominchord on the album. Roughly a month after working on Flamingo (but before completing Le Noise), Lanois was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. One of the few production projects Lanois took on in the years following the accident was co-producing the song “Heart of a Girl” on The Killers’ Battle Born album.
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