Daniel Lanois
For The Beauty Of Wynona

I believe that my review of "Shine" didn't reveal any mysteries about Daniel Lanois, neither to those who read it nor to myself who wrote it. Whether you like it or not, an album released a decade after its predecessor can be considered a standalone episode, a burst... To understand more, there was a need for a point of comparison. Listening to "Arcadie," his debut album, I caught a glimpse of Lanois always as the sophisticated and cool singer-songwriter, but also as a heartfelt interpreter of roots and a delicate performer. Cool because heartfelt, sophisticated because delicate: probably it's like that.

In 1993 "For The Beauty Of Wynona" was released, an album that in some ways seems to reprise the debut's recipe, in others it seems to demand even more. It starts with "The Messenger," a modern pop blues in Clapton style, obviously stripped down until the skeleton is bare; "Brother L.A." is hot ice, an Antarctic soul-rock: so far it's all stuff that doesn't exist on "Arcadie."

More "reassuring" is the autumnal folk half "Meggie May" of "Still Learning How To Crawl" and especially the experiments "Beatrice" and "Waiting": Lanois is one of those who oddly becomes more predictable when he breaks the pop-rock conventions rather than when he tries to propose their version of the usual dishes... Or at least that's what I understood!

Still "Arcadie"-style in the guitar and voice, English and French (as it was for "Jolie Louise") of "The Collection Of Marie Claire," and the simple ballad of "Death Of A Train." It seems suspended halfway between many barely sketched desires, lacking the courage to take a definitive direction: so in "The Unbreakable Chain" he inserts a myriad of percussive trot to give an extra tone to an all too predictable little ballad, or again in "Indian Red" seems to want to attempt a tribal experiment, only to reconsider and regularly return to the melodies of his roots.

Better, much better, when he accepts and "accepts himself" as a pop and pop-rock composer "of root origin" who studied recording techniques more and better than his companions with spurs on their boots; there he proves to excel, giving birth to the splendid "Lotta Love To Give" and the dramatic, at times Arabesque and hypnotic, title track.

Repeating "Arcadie," therefore, with its linear splendor of ballads and the usability of the experiments contained within, was challenging, but just as complicated was surpassing that taste and emotional tension. And anyway "For The Beauty Of Wynona" is not at all an unhappy album, and it grows with each listen, slowly seducing. Certainly, reviewing the album is necessary, but it was mostly the character that intrigued: an author who seems capable of every blessing, and who chooses to work almost exclusively with heart (ballads) and mind (experiments), when he is undoubtedly capable of proposing even more muscular and visceral tracks (if it wasn't clear, those are the ones I prefer).

Another Canadian who prefers the foil to the axe.