The pedal steel guitar is a remarkably complex instrument, both a marvel of modern engineering and a stubborn beast. It’s predicated on the idea of a hard cylinder skating up and down the fretboard, and all the tradeoffs required to bend notes and chords around its sleek but unforgiving axis. To allow the notes to glide the way they do, while still letting players modulate chords in the fashion of a conventional guitar, workarounds had to be built into the instrument as it developed over the years: a mind-boggling array of foot pedals and knee levers, plus multiple necks of 10 or even 14 strings each.
But it works, almost miraculously so. All those pulleys and levers come off less like simple machines and more like circuits in a computer; we just hear music pouring forth—a sound like water, like air, like colors loosed from the spectrum and left to run free in unpredictable rivulets. Daniel Lanois’ *Goodbye to Language *is a celebration of that elegant artifice. Recorded solely using pedal steel, his collaborator Rocco Deluca’s lap steel, and Lanois’ characteristic battery of effects, it highlights the instrument’s mutability—its legato touch, soft attack, long sustain, and tremulous vibrato—and it channels those qualities into free-floating music that flirts with the very dissolution of structure, even as it makes the most of its harmonic relationships.
It helps that Lanois has considerable expertise with effects boxes, tricks with tape, and assorted mixing-desk voodoo. He got his start recording Christian a cappella groups in a multi-track studio he pieced together in his mother’s basement in Hamilton, Ontario, and by the early ’70s, he was recording Rick James down there. A decade after that, he helped Brian Eno realize groundbreaking ambient albums like Ambient 4: On Land, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, and The Pearl, with Harold Budd. Working on albums like U2’s The Unforgettable Fire* *and The Joshua Tree, and Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy—in which he had Dylan play and sing to the accompaniment of a Roland TR-808 drum machine—he developed a style that balances extreme technique and extreme naturalism until the two create a new kind of truth, a kind of enhanced realism.
Lanois has recorded many solo albums before this one, most of them focused on more traditional songwriting. His last, 2014’s Flesh and Machine, flirted with the idea of ambient and experimental music, and one of its songs, “Aquatic,” even introduced the reverberant, free-flowing pedal-steel techniques of Goodbye to Language. But his new album distills that vision to achieve a kind of purity that is rare for any musical process. It sounds like country music that has been dubbed from tape to tape until it has achieved the consistency of spun honey. It’s difficult music to talk about in any detail because the details themselves are so diffuse; no two tracks sound exactly the same but they all blur together, even after dozens of listens, into a blissful kind of ur-music, amniotic and quietly ecstatic. Parsing its mechanics is a little like trying to describe the specific qualities of different kinds of sunlight.
That title, Goodbye to Language, speaks directly to the pedal steel’s uncannily expressive qualities. Motifs appear and dissolve again just as quickly. There is just enough dissonance to keep you caught up in its mechanics, and the relationships between chords can be quite counterintuitive and strange, but there is no real discord. As the songs shift from chord to chord, they move with an easy, lilting motion, and the most obviously electronic aspects—the loops, the backmasked bits—disappear faithfully back within the whole, determined never to call attention to themselves. Occasionally, a sense of physicality comes to the fore: squeaks of fingertips against strings, whorls of ribbed wire peeling off in delay. But for the most part, the music gives the illusion of being something sourceless, something created without effort—not product, but pure being; not labor, but freedom.
