When you’re still awake at 8 A.M after staying up all night, things are not right. Everything is a bit surreal, objects are closer than they appear, and you really should be asleep. But there are certain situations where it does happen, and the last day of mixing an album is one of those situations. The sky outside the studio gets lighter and your head starts to take the shape of a large peanut in the shell. Suddenly you’re craving pancakes.

It had been a long project, one of those ones where the producers actually need to become de facto members of the band for awhile in order for that band to make anything resembling a record. And since we had effectively joined the band, the drama of their project had infiltrated our world. Nerves had been on edge, budgets had been tight, and editing software had been pushed to its absolute limits. As we sat there with our blueberry pancakes, watching the well-rested people come and go in this historic Hollywood breakfast joint, we were filled with a dubious kind of tradesman’s pride: unsure whether the thing we had just created would have any useful purpose in the world, like a huge monument to an unloved leader, we still had to stand back at our work and say, “Damn. Not too bad.”

But it wasn’t a particularly soulful feeling. We were looking for a bit of soul in the form of this restaurant, and in each other’s ragged company. No one else in the room could possibly understand where we were coming from, and I raised a breakfast link with my fork and quoted the old axiom: ‘Pop records are like sausages… they’re much better if you don’t see how they’re made.”

And then he walked in.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noted the appearance of a leather-clad motorcyclist with an old military-style biker helmet as he walked in and took a place at one of the diner barstools. Then my partner murmured bluntly, “That’s Daniel Lanois.” I kind of thought the guy looked familiar, but I just cackled “yeah, right” and stirred my coffee. But he was insistent: “I’m telling you, dude. It’s him.”

A few nights earlier we were killing precious studio time watching an episode of the great music TV show Sessions at West 54th, in which Lanois, playing in a duet with drummer Brady Blade, put down some of the most terrifyingly awesome electric guitar I had ever heard. It was a force of nature; it sounded like Hendrix if he’d lived to the mid-70′s, combined with a gale-force Gulf Coast wind. And while it hurt me to know that there was, once again, a sound in my head that had been perfectly realized by someone else, it was somehow fitting that the man who generated the sound was (a.) Canadian, (b.) not really well-known as a ‘guitar hero’, and (c.) the consummate producer’s producer who had made the only albums in the entire 1980s that still received regular rotation in my CD player. Daniel Lanois was at the helm of, among others, U2′s The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, Peter Gabriel’s So and Us, the Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon, Lanois’ own incredible solo record Acadie, Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball and a ton of groundbreaking ambient records with fellow musical genius Brian Eno.

And now this patron saint of producers walked into our 8 A.M. peanut-headed universe, wearing clothes that could only go along with a vintage Indian motorcycle parked outside, as if to say, There is more out there, lads. And yes, I play the guitar sound that you hear in your head. And I will get on my Indian bike after breakfast, and hit the open road until I reach the jungles of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border.

I told him it was great to see him, and that he would serve as an omen of good fortune due to our skewed perspective on life that morning. He was gracious. We talked about how much effort it takes to sort out your papers as a Canadian in the States (curious – you bastards should be so lucky! Lanois?), things like that. I got out of his face pretty quickly and allowed him to continue his day.

My own day was to end in less than an hour due to exhaustion, but I decided that as soon as I woke up I would drive all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge . And I did.

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