Daniel Lanois

Grant Avenue and the Eno years

Daniel Roland Lanois was born on September 19, 1951 in Hull, Quebec, and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, where the family moved when he was ten. He began on penny whistle at nine and then pedal steel, and at seventeen built a recording studio with his brother Bob in their mother's home in Ancaster. Grant Avenue Studio, a three-storey Victorian house in Hamilton run with Bob, was expanded to 24 track around 1980; Eno called it a sound processing laboratory, and it hosted Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, Michael Brook and Roger Eno. He produced Simply Saucer, Martha and the Muffins, Ray Materick, Raffi and Parachute Club. Sources date the start of the Eno partnership to 1979 or 1980, when Eno booked time there for Budd's The Plateaux of Mirror.

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (July 29, 1983, EG Records) was recorded at Grant Avenue in 1981 and 1982 and co-produced by Lanois, who plays pedal steel on "Silver Morning", "Deep Blue Day" and "Weightless". He co-produced U2's The Unforgettable Fire with Eno in 1984, then Peter Gabriel's So (1986), U2's The Joshua Tree (1987), Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy (1989) and Time Out of Mind (1997), Emmylou Harris's Wrecking Ball (1995), and U2's Achtung Baby (1991) and All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000). Time Out of Mind and The Joshua Tree won the Album of the Year Grammy, and the Canadian Encyclopedia counts a third for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. He has seven Grammys, and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award in 2013.

His solo debut Acadie (September 26, 1989) was written and recorded largely in New Orleans, followed by For the Beauty of Wynona (1993), Shine (2003), Belladonna (2005), Here Is What Is (2007), Flesh and Machine (2014), Heavy Sun (2021) and Player, Piano (September 23, 2022). He formed Black Dub in 2009 with Brian Blade, Daryl Johnson and Trixie Whitley, scored Sling Blade (1996) and wrote for Red Dead Redemption 2, and published the memoir Soul Mining (2010). In a 1987 Sound On Sound interview, he said it was more important to capture a feeling than to have the very best gear. In his Red Bull Music Academy talk of 2015 he said he never waits for a mixing day to get back to the sound.