New adventures in hi-fi

It’s a beautiful loop. Superstar producer and musicians’ musician Daniel Lanois’ newest adventure in hi-fi Here Is What Is began life as a documentary about the making of his latest album, but the album in question evolved into a soundtrack to the film.

“I wanted to make a record, and a friend of mine said, ‘Why don’t you bring a camera into the studio and look at the situation through a lens?’” Lanois explains over tea in the Shelbourne hotel, on a break from the latest U2 sessions in Hanover Quay. “So I said ‘okay’, and that opening shot with Garth Hudson playing the piano intro came to us very early on. And on the strength of that I decided it seemed like a reasonable idea, and we kept moving from city to city for the purposes of my work, and every town we went to we caught a little something, and it just started adding up to a nice film. And quite late in the project there was that sit-down with Eno, where we had a little bit of an exchange, and by slotting in those little philosophical moments it kind of tied everything together.”
Featuring cameos from the aforementioned Band man, Eno, Billy Bob Thornton, Sinéad O’Connor and drummer Brian Blade, Here Is What Is is an extraordinary documentary that ventures deep inside the guts of the music, depicting the process of making and recording it in graphic detail. There are a lot of close-ups of hands: on piano keys, on the pedal steel, on the mixing desk.
“Yeah, a bit of a hands theme,” Lanois chuckles. “It started with Garth, and Adam, the guy working the camera, also shot close-ups of my hands on the steel guitar, which is a very complex instrument, and to see how it’s done is fascinating enough in itself to show for a while, so why not? I wish I had a nice uninterrupted film of the movement of Michael Jackson’s feet. We never see him dance, we see the editing room dance!
“Some of the young idealistic record listeners that I know, they don’t want to see fast edits anymore,” he continues. “They’re curious about the authenticity of something, and to slow the pace down a little bit. It doesn’t mean slow the rhythm down, but just slow the pace of the servings. It’s hard in these fast times to be courageous enough to make something like this, it was very expensive to make, travelling and feeding people and putting them in hotels, but I’m proud of it. Is it a perfect film? I’m not sure about that, but it can at least hold its head up in terms of having brought quality to the table. Sometimes I think I go missing in the cracks of the massive campaigns. It’s a tourist trap out there, isn’t it?"

Here Is What Is is available from redfloorrecords.com. Daniel Lanois plays the Irish Film Institute, Dublin (May 31) and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway (July 1), following a screening of the film.