Producer Daniel Lanois Discusses Making of "Walk With Me" + UNCUT Review (UPDATED)

Watch a conversation with Daniel Lanois, the producer of Neil Young's new album 'Le Noise' about the making of the track "Walk With Me."
(Thanks http://purplewordsonagreybackground.blogspot.com/!)

From Uncut.co.uk | Wild Mercury Sound - Post details: Neil Young: "Le Noise" by John Mulvey:

To be honest, a few alarm bells went off when I read this quote. “I wanted [Neil Young] to understand that I’ve spent years dedicated to the sonics in my home and that I wanted to give him something he’d never heard before,” said Daniel Lanois the other week.

“He picked up that instrument, which had everything — an acoustic sound, electronica, bass sounds — and he knew as soon as he played it that we had taken the acoustic guitar to a new level. It’s hard to come up with a new sound at the back end of 50 years of rock and roll, but I think we did it.”

I’ve long been wary of Lanois’ somewhat portentous way of talking about music he’s involved with, and have been generally equivocal about the cushioned echo chambers he often creates for his production clients. As an amused fan of “Fork In The Road”, “Living With War” and “Greendale”, and someone less enamoured with “Prairie Wind”, I tend to think that latterday Neil Young, though always interesting, is at his best when he’s at his rawest and most unfettered, not embarking on a notionally more formatted project with production, studios and so on.

Which I guess is a long-winded way of saying that I feared the worst when word started circulating about his collaboration with Lanois, initially flagged up as “Twisted Road”. Bootlegs of the new songs as performed on the “Twisted Road” tour were strong, sure, but personally, I thought Lanois basically mugged and smothered some of Dylan’s best late-period songs on “Time Out Of Mind”. What would he do here? What did he really consider to be a “new sound”? And wasn’t Neil’s wallowing, splenetic, endlessly capricious old sound radical enough?

Well, it transpires that it mostly was. I can’t really explain the technical preparations that Lanois made before Neil Young picked up the electric and acoustic guitars that are the solitary instruments on “Le Noise”. Mostly, though, he lets them crank and spit and reverberate with a healthy amount of space around them, layering on the delays and effects with relative subtlety. Most importantly, it doesn’t sound as if Lanois has worried the sound to death, as seems to be his habit. Rather, the vituperative spontaneity of Neil’s current schtick comes across strongly: once again, these are songs that flaunt their rough edges, that feel as if he completed them mere moments before recording began.

More of review from Uncut.co.uk | Wild Mercury Sound - Post details: Neil Young: "Le Noise" by John Mulvey.


Le Noise by Neil Young
(Click to Zoom Cover)
Release Date: September 28, 2010

More on Neil Young's New Album 'Le Noise'. Also, see:

- Video of Neil Young's "Angry World" from Le Noise
- Neil Young's Le Noise: "Just a man on a stool"
- "Imagination never sleeps": Neil Young's Le Noise
- NPR Previews Neil Young's Le Noise's "Walk With Me"
- Dead Man Soundtrack: Preview of Le Noise?
- Anticipating Neil Young's album Le Noise

FWIW, pre-orders for Le Noise by Neil Young are already ranked at #8 #5 on Amazon.com Bestseller listing.

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