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Daniel Lanois, seen in L.A. in 2015.Marthe Amanda Vannebo

It's 8:30 in the morning and Daniel Lanois is calling. He had heard I wanted to chat with him about U2's The Joshua Tree, which he co-produced. And he was in a mood.

"Is that where we're at," Lanois boomed over the line, "talking about an album that was made 30 years ago? Is that where we're at, catering to old people? I'm not 18, but I know better."

Released in 1987, The Joshua Tree was a sonically ambitious revelation that Lanois helped create with U2, co-producer Brian Eno and engineer Mark (Flood) Ellis. What I hadn't yet told Lanois was that I wanted to talk about it as a jumping-off point. It was my notion that the motivation to make masterpieces like The Joshua Tree is missing in today's attention-challenged world.

In his memoir, Soul Mining, Lanois wrote that The Joshua Tree was made in a time of great diligence and concentration: "I hope that level of care never goes away."

Has that level of care now gone away, on an industry-wide scale? It's all about the singles now, as if Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band had never happened. Superstar artists today release playlists and mixed tapes, and the Grimeses, Kendrick Lamars and Radioheads are few and far between.

There was a pause on the line before Lanois picked up the thread and invited me down to his "shop" in Toronto's Roncesvalles neighbourhood for an interview. "I'll talk about the past a little," he said. "But I want you to know that what made The Joshua Tree was the burning fire in peoples' hearts, and those people are still around – including Danny Lanois."

The Joshua Tree, an exhaustive year in the making, was released on March 9, 1987. The record's first sounds were cinematic and auspicious, followed by the Edge's jangling guitar and, finally, people-get-ready bass notes from Adam Clayton. U2 was four horsemen on the horizon. The first bars of The Joshua Tree's opening cut, Where the Streets Have No Name, served as an announcement and a signal for a promising new era: I wanna run, I wanna hide / I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside.

"It was so out of step with everything around," Bono said of The Joshua Tree in a 1999 Classic Albums documentary. "It was mad. It was like an ecstatic music."

The record was a smash immediately, topping the charts in more than 20 countries, with hit singles With or Without You, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for and Where the Streets Have No Name. "This is the reason you buy a CD player," a friend told me at the time. Within a year of the album's release, the sales of compact discs overtook vinyl. (It would take until 1991 for CDs to overtake cassettes.)

The album was just the first of that year's classic LPs to come. Other 1987 blockbusters included Prince's Sign o' the Times, Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, Michael Jackson's Bad, Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation, Sting's … Nothing Like the Sun and R.E.M.'s Document. It was the dawn of an age. By the mid-1990s, retailers and labels were over the moon and feeling unbeatable. The money-spinning days were supposed to last forever.

Of course, they did not. Illegal digital downloads were the first blow, and now streaming services are fast making the days of owning music seem like the buggy-whip era. But here's the thing: First, digital made the picking and choosing of songs possible. Now, streaming has lessened the stakes when it comes to how much money an album can make for record companies and artists. There's less an incentive to make a classic record. And, so, while the album still lives as a marketable form, its artistic necessity is dropping.

A few days after our phone conversation, I arrive to find the front door wide open at Lanois's sprawling west-end clubhouse. I hear music: Lanois is playing a pedal-steel guitar, sublimely with a spiritual vibe, somewhere inside. How do you find Lanois, the sound-shaping producer of albums from not only U2 but Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris and Neil Young?

You follow the sound.

Past the pool table, the bar and the large potted plants, the serene noise leads to Lanois at his instrument, surrounded by speakers and recording equipment. Once he finishes, we make small talk as his assistant dials up a few things to listen to.

The first is a new version of Running to Stand Still, one of the two remixes Lanois contributed to the 30th-anniversary reissue of The Joshua Tree. It's dreamier and more emotional, with orchestrated horns in one section that, according to Lanois, made Bono cry. "I got a message from Bono telling me he was in tears listening to my remix," Lanois says. "He told me I'd gotten the song to another dimension."

Lanois is more interested, though, in showing off a new track he'd done with Aaron Funk, an adventurer in "breakcore" electronic music who goes by the professional moniker Venetian Snares. The two will play a concert together at Toronto's Great Hall on WednesdayMay 31. The cut Lanois shares is distinctly contemporary: squiggly electronica, everywhere beats, ambient clattering and an unearthly pedal steel. It's so cutting-edge, I might need a tourniquet. "My skills and tastes have evolved," says Lanois, a rugged-looking 65.

Asked about U2, which is currently touring The Joshua Tree across North America, Lanois says he sees the band "now and again."

When he says "it's not enough to be in the tourist business," I assume he's talking about the celebrations of landmark albums. Both The Joshua Tree and 50-year-old Sgt. Pepper's are getting the big anniversary-edition treatment this summer.

"It's so easy to reference something that's already happened," Lanois says. As far as music being made today, he says it's ruled by hit singles and the bean counters. "The climate and culture has changed radically. But there are people who still like the idea of an album as something you listen to from top to bottom."

With The Joshua Tree (and with the ambient music he made with Eno in Hamilton in the early 1980s), Lanois saw the opportunity to go places sonically that were previously unimaginable. Thirty years later, he still feels that way. "I'm still burning, I'm still trying and I still want to make masterpieces."

U2 probably still wants to make masterpieces, too. But here they are on a victory lap for an album 30 years old. It's 2017, and Bono is singing that he still hasn't found what he's looking for. One wonders if his eyes are even open any longer.

Daniel Lanois and Venetian Snares play Toronto's Great Hall on May 31 (ticketmaster.ca).

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