Quick quiz – what have the Neville Brothers’ 1989 album ‘Yellow Moon,’ Bob Dylan’s ‘Oh Mercy’ from the same year, and Emmylou Harris’s ‘Wrecking Ball,’ released in 1995, have in common? Extra bonus points but no cigar if you say they all have Bob Dylan songs on them. The other common thread is the producer, Daniel Lanois.

Well, that’s all very well, some of you might say. But what does a record producer actually do? And who is Daniel Lanois anyway?

The first question’s a bit difficult to pin down, as it varies from record to record and producer to producer. It’s not the same as a movie producer, who’s kind of generally the money man that makes movies happen financially, as I understand it. It’s probably a bit closer to the director’s role in movies, but it varies, as I say, from the dictatorial approach of Phil Spector, who produced everyone from the Motown greats to Leonard Cohen, sometimes literally at gunpoint, to the much more collaborative methods of folks like Lanois.

The other thing to say is that Lanois himself doesn’t like the term. It’s a credit on the record label for someone, but the truth is even as between the three albums I’ve picked out, Lanois’s role variously involved helping to engineer the sound, arranging the songs, playing instrumental parts on them, and, at times, acting as the go-between for the artists and their muse.

So who is Daniel Lanois? According to his autobiography, he’s just a guy who liked recording stuff and playing guitar, doing home taping experiments with his brother in the Canadian backwoods, who went, in a few brief pages, to co-producing U2’s 1987 classic album ‘The Joshua Tree.’ That was to lead directly to him producing Dylan, following a Guinness-fuelled introduction from Bono, but let’s just remind ourselves of how good he and Brian Eno made U2 sound:

Hear that guitar going off in the right speaker? And the way the drums and bass all have their own place in some reverb-drenched Valhalla? It’s all pretty familiar now, partly because that album was a huge success, and partly because the sound has been copied by loads of people since, but just think of the synth-heavy scene that was 1987. Even Springsteen had them lathered all over his stuff back then, for goodness’ sake.

But this – this was a new way to express rock music, that guitar/bass/drums bastard child of every other American genre we know and love. One of the things that draws me to Lanois’s work is that he is a guitar player himself: in fact, some of the guitar you hear on ‘I Still Haven’t Found…,’ the percussive bits, is him, not Edge. Saying that, he’s also always said of this album that Larry Mullen’s and Adam Clayton’s work on drums and bass respectively is underappreciated.

‘The Joshua Tree’ was recorded in a series of domestic houses in Ireland, and this was an aspect of the process that Lanois was to literally pick up and take with him for future projects, including the recording in New Orleans of ‘Yellow Moon.’ Taking the rental of a house in the centre of that atmospheric city, Lanois brought in his own equipment, and worked with the Neville Brothers on a beautiful, soulful record that captures a diverse set of songs in a single, moody ambience. Here’s one of my favourites:

Note, despite this being proto-rap in nature, the way the guitars and other instruments shimmer away under the vocal? The album featured original compositions by the Nevilles in combination with others, as well as covers of Link Wray, Sam Cooke, and the aforementioned Dylan – ‘With God on our Side’ and ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown.’ With AP Carter’s ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken,’ it’s an album full of soul and hard intention. Not everyone was a fan of Lanois’s production method by then – some felt it was too intrusive – but, well, listen to it for yourself. I love it.

Here’s what Dylan says about meeting Lanois for the first time, having come down to see him during the recording of ‘Yellow Moon’: ‘He was noir all the way – dark sombrero, black britches, high boots, slip-on gloves – all shadow and silhouette – dimmed out, a black prince from the black hills…’

They talk for a while by a hotel pool, then Lanois takes Dylan down to the house where the recording’s happening to listen to some playbacks: ‘One of the Neville Brothers was resting in the room, hands together in his lap, head tipped back, cap down over his eyes … it surprised me to hear two of my songs … sung by Aaron Neville …

‘Aaron is one of the world’s great singers, a figure of rugged power, built like a tank but has the most angelic singing voice, a voice that could almost redeem a lost soul … it always suprises me to hear a song of mine done by an artist like this who is on such a high level. Over the years, songs might get away from you, but a version like this always brings it closer again.’

Then came Dylan’s album ‘Oh Mercy,’ which I’ve written about before, so I’ll content myself with a few words. Recorded in another New Orleans house near Lafayette No. 2 Cemetery, it’s a great, atmospheric, underrated Dylan album. Lanois himself felt, at the end of a somewhat tortuous and not always harmonious recording process, that he and Dylan had recorded ‘a masterpiece of sorts,’ and Dylan was proud enough of it to devote a quarter of his ‘Chronicles, Volume One,’ to that process. Here’s an example from that album (cracking video too: hadn’t seen it before now):

Last but by no means least, there’s Emmylou, of whom Dylan once said, ‘there are only two types of men: the ones in love with Emmylou Harris, and the ones who haven’t met her yet.’

In 1995, Harris was 48, trying to adjust to a label of ‘elder stateswoman of country,’ when she decided to go in a different direction from her previous acoustic albums, and enlisted Lanois to produce ‘Wrecking Ball.’ The opening track shows the Lanois trademarks: drums placed centre of the overall sound, bass given its place, and guitars squalling down the well while Emmylou’s voice soars, clear as a crystal stream, above it all.

So. You’ll have gathered by now I’m a fan of Daniel Lanois. So much so that I’ve bought ‘Yellow Moon’ and ‘Wrecking Ball’ recently. ‘Oh Mercy,’ I had already, obviously, as I worked on the live show we did back in July of it.

Norman Lamont, who was such a big part of that show – lead vocals for some of the songs, lead guitarist throughout – had also been listening to the Lanois production method. When I asked him to review some earlier versions of the tracks for my own album, he proposed a remix of one, incorporating some production methods he’d found (if you’re not into production methods, you don’t have to watch this one):

Suffice to say I loved it, and, whilst Norman is far too modest to say he’s cracked the Lanois method, and I’m certainly not about to pit my songs up against the foresaid artists, here’s Norman’s remix, which is the version I put on ‘Home from Home’ album (which, incidentally, you can pre-order before 3rd November and get a slim pdf of poetry to boot):

Incidentally, the track will also feature on a 3 track EP sampler of the album, to be released by Tom Hilton on Aldora Britain Records. Stay tuned!