Daniel Lanois opens his East Coast run at the Iron Horse

Lanois's trio plays Northampton's 200-capacity room on Friday, Nov 6, the first of four dates and months after his album Belladonna Nocturne came out.

The Iron Horse holds about 200 people. Next Friday one of those 200 seats goes to whoever is closest to Daniel Lanois's guitar, near enough to hear how the sound is built.

Daniel Lanois plays the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton on Friday, Nov 6, at 7 p.m. Tickets are on Tixr, where the show is listed as the Daniel Lanois Trio. Northampton is the first of four dates on this run, followed by Philadelphia on Nov 10, Washington, D.C. on Nov 12 and the Manchester–Nashua area on Nov 15. It's also the first Pioneer Valley date for Lanois in our records.

The trio is a fairly new project. A Canadian arts profile says Lanois started the Lanois Trio in a chapel on the outskirts of Berlin, with Jermaine Holmes on drums and vocals and Jim Wilson on bass and vocals. Listings for the trio's Ontario dates this summer put three-part vocals at the centre of the show. So this isn't a solo set of pedal-steel ambience. It's a band with three singers, and Lanois's guitar and production instincts fill out the rest.

The new record is the hook. In June Lanois released Belladonna Nocturne, a 14-track album he composed and performed himself and framed as a sequel to his 2005 instrumental album *Belladonna*. Longtime collaborators turn up on it, including Emmylou Harris, Brian Blade and Daryl Johnson. It's the kind of patient, atmospheric record that's worth hearing before the show. How much of it the trio plays on Nov 6 is up to the band. The album is mostly instrumental and the trio is built around voices, so expect the two sides to meet somewhere in the middle.

The room should help. A 200-capacity listening room means you can hear amp hum, a brushed snare and harmonies sung slightly off-mic. That close-up sound is what people go to Lanois records for, and the Iron Horse delivers it without a PA working to fill a big hall. Northampton crowds also know how to stay quiet when the music calls for it.

The Valley gets this one first. Tour openers can be loose, with players still working out a set, or they can be a band arriving fresh with something to prove. In a room this small, either is worth watching.

What to know: it's a 7 p.m. show on a Friday, so you can have dinner downtown afterward instead of before. With a capacity of 200 and a run this short, it may not last until the day of the show. If you want to go, buy now.

A trio built on three voices, playing a room small enough to hear every one.

Listen to Belladonna Nocturne this week, then go hear what three people in a small room do with that kind of space.

Sources: Daniel Lanois Trio – Tixr (Iron Horse, Nov 6) (tixr.com); Daniel Lanois – Belladonna Nocturne (Hemifrån) (hemifran.com); Music legend Daniel Lanois brings his Lanois Trio to Kay Meek Arts Centre – Create a Stir (createastir.ca); Daniel Lanois Trio – Visit Grey (visitgrey.ca); Daniel Lanois at Iron Horse Music Hall – JamBase (jambase.com); Daniel Lanois – Meaford Hall (meaford.ca)