THE DANIEL LANOIS ENCOUNTER LAST NIGHT AT THE GRAMMY MUSEUM:
12. Announced that he had created a new musical language that all walks of life would understand.
11. Is hell-bent on recording an entire record in the backseat of his ’72 Cadillac.
10. Was dressed like “Billy Bob Thornton meets Apocalyptic Trucker” and kept chewing weird little white pieces of ginger.
9. Revealed that he lived with Peter Gabriel during the production of “So” (or maybe it was “Us”) in a BELL TOWER on Peter’s property (???).
8. Kept lamenting on the fact that the “purple smoke” he wanted for the evening was not available.
7. Kept demanding that questions be “pungent”. He also only really wanted to talk to girls, which I get. When I asked him about any explosions of rage or emotional outbursts of note in his past studio sessions and how he navigates varying artistic temperaments, he told me he threw a chair once and smashed some windows and has many, many regrets about how he handled certain artists and blames his hotheaded-ness on the fact that he wears leather and is French-Canadian (???).
6. Surrounds himself with extraordinarily youthful (albeit talented) men, one of whom was wearing one of those big, brown Pharrell hats and what looked like a Civil War-era men’s nightgown. The drummer kid he found in a bar in Silverlake was astounding.
5. Would only refer to U2 as “those guys from Ireland”.
4. The use of short films to accentuate tracks on his new record he played live where some of the most pretentious, amateurish, bottom-of-the-film-school-student-heap visuals I’ve ever seen in my life. Lanois LOVED them. Which made me kind of had a change of heart for what I was seeing. And he insisted that we were on the verge of a new Cultural Revolution. (This came after telling us he broke 10 bones in his body after a motorcycle accident in 2010 and got a new outlook on life…)
3. HOWEVER… at one point he used a pen and ink animation that was older than film itself, containing several grotesques heads of varying creatures opening their hungry mouths wide while countless black frogs LEAPT into them (you can imagine the chewing). THAT was amazing.
2. Kept jonesing for whiskey and the host kept saying, “no whiskey!”
1. PASSIONATELY DECLARED HIS LOVE OF SMUCKER’S-BRAND JELLIES & JAMS!!!
I must admit…Lanois was one of the most provocative figures I’ve witnessed in a good long time. A fascinating character. I would read his autobiography. And his new record, “Flesh and Machine”, works MUCH better for me in the car without the short film punctuations. It’s a mood enhancer.
WINE PAIRING: I feel Daniel Lanois has earned the right to INDULGE himself in anything he wants to do, share, create, exploit, expand…present. So I simply say unto you, my wine-soaked reader: Indulge Yourself.