E-Mail This Article to a Friend Belladonna daze Daniel Lanois teams up with Tortoise BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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Producer and guitarist Daniel Lanois is pissed off. Although he made his new Belladonna (Anti-) in the laid-back, airy spaces of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, he’s a long-time New Orleans resident, and he’s reeling over the Bush administration’s bungling of the Katrina disaster.

"It’s a very sad situation, and again, the losers are the poor," he says quietly. After we chat for a while about how the Bush-ites have in a few short years managed to turn the Great American Dream into the Great American Clusterfuck, Lanois does mention a personal silver lining — Belladonna and the tour he’s about to launch with slow-rock whiz kids Tortoise as his backing band. After a couple days practicing in Tortoise’s home base, Chicago, the jaunt begins next Thursday with a show at the Somerville Theatre.

If the pairing of the producer who’s made hit albums for Peter Gabriel, U2, Willie Nelson, and Emmylou Harris with the kings of Chicago post-rock seems unlikely, well, these are the facts. Before Tortoise, there was Tortoise’s incrementally evolving ambient music, which was pioneered in the pop world by musician and producer Brian Eno and, beginning in 1979, his young engineer and collaborator, Lanois. Since then, Lanois and Eno have gone on to work together and separately with U2 — their co-operative labors yielding such hits as "Beautiful Day" — and Lanois has become a giant among producers on his own. Like Eno, the 54-year-old Quebec-born sonic visionary has also become an accomplished solo artist.

Until now, Lanois’s solo albums have featured his pedal steel and other guitars, an array of sonic treatments, and soft-spoken, poetic lyrics that have positioned him somewhere in among the folk, rock, and textural-music worlds. Belladonna is different. It’s an instrumental outing colored by the sounds and cactus-pocked landscape of the Baja with Lanois’s pedal steel at its core. The 13 tunes mostly conjure visions of quiet open spaces with subdued utopian glee, but on some of the numbers, like "Telco" and "The Deadly Nightshade," clusters of noise creep in. Lanois explains they’re stand-ins for the mental static he’s feeling these days, for the clouds of anger and disappointment that come when he thinks about how Americans have been misled and betrayed by their political leaders.

But he also has a sense that this lush, gorgeous, evocative album may be his masterpiece. "I wanted to make one of those records that people could listen to when I’m gone and say, ‘I’m getting a feeling from this and my spirits have been lifted.’ If I can pull it off, that’s a major triumph for me. And I’m playing the pedal steel better than I ever have, so perhaps those things have come together for Belladonna."

Lanois says the album is "a return to the values" he first learned working with Eno from 1979 to 1984 on a series of ambient recordings with Harold Budd and others. "It can be an incredible abyss when you’re working with sonics, in that one thing leads to another to another to another. The discipline is to stay within a philosophy. I learned from Brian that it’s good to have rules and it’s good to step outside of them."

Hence the concerts with Tortoise. Although Lanois has toured before, it’s been alone or with a clutch of hired hands. "[Anti- label president] Andy Kaulkin said, ‘Why don’t you tour with Tortoise, because they have a lovely fan base that expects nothing but instrumental music. You can have their fan base and they can have yours.’ It’s a commercial decision, but I like what they do and I’ve never done anything like this, so we’re rolling the dice."