Daniel Lanois - Heavy Sun - CD DIGIPAK

“I sense that I’m on the verge of a new chapter,” says Daniel Lanois.
Given the eleven-time GRAMMY®-winner’s eclectic résumé, it’s not all that shocking of a revelation. Whether crafting ambient records with Brian Eno, making rock and roll history with U2 and Peter Gabriel, digging into American roots with Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris, scoring Oscar-winning films and blockbuster video games, or composing his own solo music, Lanois has always seemed to reinvent himself every three or four years with a chameleon-like ease. Heavy Sun, the soulful, debut from Lanois and his invigorating new all-star band. Recorded in Los Angeles and Toronto, the album fuses classic gospel and modern electronics, mixing gritty, human textures with crisp, digital accents and lush, swirling atmospherics to create a sound that’s at once warmly familiar and boldly unexpected. The arrangements here are spacious and dreamy, anchored by rich, righteous organ topped with airy falsetto and mesmerizing four-part harmony, and the writing is buoyant and soulful to match, tapping into the shared uncertainty of the human condition to offer hope, comfort, and connection at a time when all three run in desperately short supply. “We want to lift people’s spirits with this music,” says Lanois. “It’s so easy to feel isolated right now, but we want everyone to feel included in what we’re doing.”That communal spirit is on full display here, with Lanois and his bandmates—guitarist/vocalist Rocco DeLuca, organist/vocalist Johnny Shepherd, and bassist/vocalist Jim Wilson—showcasing an undeniable chemistry and boundless appetite for sonic discovery that far surpasses the influence of any individual member. While Lanois may be best known for his production work on era-defining albums like Joshua Tree, Wrecking Ball, and Time Out Of Mind, he actually grew up on organ records and gospel music, and he cut his teeth as a young man in the studio recording vocal quartets. In the decades to come, Lanois would go on to become one of the most acclaimed studio gurus of the modern era (Rolling Stone declared that his “unmistakable fingerprints are all over an entire wing of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”), as well as a prolific solo artist (NPR hailed his “brilliant albums of heartfelt songs”), but his love of soul and gospel music never left.“It was a big part of my education,” Lanois explains. “I’ve always had a respect for the structure of the instrumentation and the harmonies, and I saw so much potential in drawing from all of that wonderful music and pushing it into the future.”Many of the album’s most arresting moments are, in fact, its simplest. The tender “Mother’s Eyes” is a bare bones, stripped-down plea for peace and understanding, while the gentle “Way Down,” mixes hymnal and doo-wop influences as it insists on kindness and love in the face of hatred and pain, and the searing “Dance On” draws on the call-and-response of the African American spiritual tradition in its rallying cry for perseverance. Perhaps it’s the reggae-tinged “Tree of Tule,” though, that best embodies the record’s commitment to finding transcendence in the ordinary.In the end, that sort of revelation is precisely what drives Heavy Sun. Lanois and his bandmates are here to draw us closer together, to spread a message of joy and love and connection bound by neither time nor space. These are uncertain times, but we share in them together, each of our fates intertwined like voices in harmony.