Pitchfork

After reading today's review of The Joshua Tree: Deluxe Edition, perhaps you're revisiting the album (which is celebrating its 20th anniversary). And perhaps you want to catch up with one of the producers who accompanied U2 as "the band finally took a moment to ponder the wide-open American spaces it had been traveling through for years." Well, Brian Eno is likely off producing the new Coldplay record, so why not cozy up to Daniel Lanois, who is planning the release of his sixth solo album?

Titled Here Is What Is and billed as the soundtrack to an accompanying documentary of the same name, the album finds Lanois teaming with jazz drummer Brian Blade and pianist Garth Hudson (of the Band). According to a press release, Here Is also features "philosophical interludes and inspiring conversations with Brian Eno taken from the film."

Both the record and the documentary will come out March 18 on CD and DVD respectively (the former via Redeye Distribution), but Lanois is giving the album a digital release via his own Red Floor Records on December 15. The download comes in high-quality waveform (.wav) format and, thankfully for the iPod generation, also regular mp3 format.

Of the documentary, which will make its U.S. premiere at SXSW in March, Lanois says, "The film is a camera following me around over the course of a year, in and out of recording studios documenting once and for all the way it really happens." Adam Vollick and Adam Samuels aided Lanois in the directing.

And finally, back to U2. Lanois is currently in the studio with the band working on the follow-up to 2004's How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb.

Here Is What Is:

01 Chest of Drawers
02 Where Will I Be
03 Here Is What Is
04 Not Fighting Anymore
05 Beauty
06 Blue Bus
07 Lovechild
08 Harry
09 Bells
10 This May Be the Last Time
11 Smoke #6
12 I Like That
13 Duo Glide
14 Bladesteel
15 Moondog
16 Sacred and Secular
17 Joy
18 Luna Samba