Daniel Lanois attends a celebration in Los Angeles, January 27, 2010.Riccardo S. Savi/Getty Images
"He called me out of the blue. He said 'I could use your help, my friend.' " Daniel Lanois is speaking on the phone from the hilly Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, where he's recuperating from the severe injuries caused by a motorcycle accident in June. The mishap, involving his sporty, street-legal BMW HP2 Megamoto, not only broke many of his bones but put a dent into his latest projects, including a new album he produced for Neil Young.
"We've made a fascinating record," said Lanois, whose previous work with the Cinnamon Girl singer was limited to Farm Aid concerts and Young's annual Bridge School Benefit shows. "It doesn't have a band - it's all him. But I tell you, man, we've got a massive sound on his electric guitar."
Lanois knows all about massive sounds. The Canadian producer, famous for his collaborations with Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson and the Dublin superstars U2, is a musician and sonic searcher - his work is marked by dazzling aural tones and studio trickery. The record with Young began as an acoustic project, but developed into what Lanois calls "electro."
"What I do is quite complex," he says, referring to the looping manipulation of sound samples. "There are sounds on here that have never been heard before."
The album was recorded at Lanois' house in Los Angeles. (He also has studios in Toronto and Jamaica.) The recordings with Young were almost completed by the time of the accident - a wreck that left Lanois shattered Evel Knievel-like, with six broken ribs, a snapped collar bone and fractured pelvis showing up on the X-rays.
After three weeks of intensive care and ongoing physiotherapy, Lanois is mobile. The bones are healing, but a partially collapsed lung may never come back completely. Still, after a such destructive accident - "I almost died" - Lanois was back to work in a surprisingly short time. Two final tracks were recorded with Young, and now the complete album is almost mixed. "I'm allowing myself a little time away from the console," he says, pouring himself a whisky as he talks.
Due for a fall release, the record's working title is Twisted Road, a follow-up to 2009's Fork in the Road. Young is showcasing some of the new material on his current solo tour.
Lanois will premiere four tracks at Toronto's sunset-to-sunrise Nuit Blanche arts festival on Oct. 2. Those songs - Walk With Me, The Hitchhiker, Sign of Love and the environmentally concerned Rumblin' ("The Earth is talking to me / I hear a rumblin' in her ground / Don't you feel that new wind blowing? / Don't you recognize that sound?") - will be presented on tape, accompanied by "striking visuals" that were filmed as Young recorded the album.
Young and Lanois, according to the latter, have been enjoying each other's Canadian-ness. "We share a similar sense of humour." Not only that, both were paperboys in their youth. "We laugh about it," says Lanois, 58. "We attribute our work ethic to having delivered the morning Globe and Mail newspaper."
Because of the accident, Lanois's summer tour with his soul-jazzed Black Dub Collective was postponed. Current plans call for an album to be released in November, with a tour to follow in 2011. "It's still very much alive," says Lanois. "It just got pushed back six months."
The Quebec-born musician, who has ridden motorcycles since his mid-teens, has no immediate plans to get back in the saddle. "I might try four wheels for a while," he laughs, but not too hard. "Let's see how that works out for me."