Daniel Lanois' beat poetry

KRT Campus Newservice

AUSTIN, Texas - In place of a typical keynote speech, Daniel Lanois kicked off the South by Southwest conference in March with reams of wordy beat poetry that left people wondering what drug the soft-spoken producer had ingested.

"Two double espressos," he says, grinning a few days after the speech. "I was quite pleased with it because it had a real sense of fun."

Fun and espresso are the last two words you might associate with Lanois, an architect of some of the most brooding sounds in rock, from U2's "The Joshua Tree" to Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind."

"You can push a button and get just about any sundry poured onto your record these days," he says. "But sometimes, it's nice to keep things bare and sparse." He's applied that same philosophy to his first solo CD in 10 years, "Shine," which came out April 22 on Anti Records which is the home of such fellow renegades as Tom Waits and Merle Haggard.