son for me. It was the opposite of what a
young guy might think. I thought if I
knocked a few commercial hits out of the
park in Canada, then that would get me
international notice. But it's the obscure,
ambient stuff that allowed me to be invit-
work on steel guitar for that reason. I
make sure that my guitar is already
plugged in, set up and well in tune. All
my sounds are ready. So, when I go in at
4 in the morning, I'm very fresh and I can
capture something quickly. I think some
05•2015
ed to work with Peter Gabriel and U2.
IE: How long did you and Brian spend
making Apollo?
Daniel Lanois: It didn't take that long. I
think it was about three weeks. Eno was
living in my house, and that's all we were
doing. One of the lessons of that chapter
for me was to live and breathe one project at a time. We were fully immersed in
that work. There were no distractions.
Brian wouldn't even allow phone calls
for himself. He had this theory that if you
took one phone call, you’d need half an
hour to get back to where you were in
terms of concentration and emotion. It’s
an interesting theory to go back to and
apply to modern times, in a world of distractions with people constantly being on
some electronic handheld device.
IE: Do you hold that practice?
Daniel Lanois: I try. One way I pull that
off is to go into the studio in the middle
of the night. I’ll go at 4 in the morning.
There's no distraction, because no one
else is out of bed. I've done some good
of the best work on the steel guitar has
been had in H