A Series of Dreams

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: DANIEL LANOIS

ALBUM: FOR THE BEAUTY OF WYNONA

LABEL: WARNER BROS.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A producer turned performer takes an eerie, rhapsodic journey through American pop myth.

If you know Daniel Lanois at all, it's probably because you've read the credits on such superb albums as Peter Gabriel's So (1986), U2's The Joshua Tree (1987) and Achtung Baby (1991), Robbie Robertson's eponymous solo album (1987) and Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy! (1989). Lanois produced, or co-produced, all of those. But, on current evidence, he did significantly more than run levels and read meters. Those albums share an occasional brotherhood of sound -- hard, lovely, otherworldly -- but more significant, they are each rounded with a dream, part funky and part fantastic, that makes them seep into the subconscious, then permeate the waking state. They are, in the title phrase from one of the splendid Dylan songs that Lanois produced, a Series of Dreams.

Collaboration at this level, with this kind of intensity, imparts its own reciprocal coloration. If Lanois gave these disparate artists a certain sympathetic unity of sound, he took from them a kind of thematic restlessness and artistic recklessness. He then applied those qualities to Acadie (1989), his wondrous first solo album as songwriter, singer and guitarist. They are in even more abundant supply here. For the Beauty of Wynona -- named for a Canadian town close to where Lanois grew up -- has a tougher rhythmic core than its predecessor. The title track takes off on a wild excursion from ballad to jams-out jam to a kind of interplanetary raga that is emblematic of the entire album-length adventure. The sound is spooky, seductive and scintillating.

With Daryl Johnson on bass and Ronald Jones on drums, Lanois has the benefit of the kind of rich rhythm section that can be both goad and guide. When a musical phrase or lyric passage threatens to send Lanois off into deep space, Johnson and Jones can pull him back; when he's revising tradition, as on Indian Red, a kind of New Orleans gumbo classic, they help him explore musical byways that can bring him home again along a brand new route. If Highway 61 ran past Cape Canaveral, Lanois would be singing at the crossroads.

If For the Beauty of Wynona has a unifying theme, it's a kind of blind-alley search for love in a world that changes before it can barely be experienced. Still Learning How to Crawl takes this theme of sentimental education and extends it past the age of anxiety into a kind of perpetual present tense, where lessons learned lead only to renewed uncertainty. Death of a Train has a real undertow of prairie melancholy, and The Unbreakable Chain is a little like a Lanois echo of Series of Dreams, a rhythmic rumination on the elisions of fantasy and desire.

Lanois' music is nowhere near as heavy, however, as what can be made of it. One of his great gifts -- which he shares with all those luminaries from his production days -- is a deft spirit and a light touch. He can rock out when he's of a mind and yet can capture, whenever he likes, certain fragile qualities that elude the rhythmic tonnage of most contemporary music. Lanois has a kind of tensile fragility: you can hear it in the uninsistent mesmerism of his voice as well as in the sorcery of his songs. He schooled himself with , some illustrious teachers, but made himself unique. With Wynona, he goes straight to the head of the class.