Some days you get stuck in traffic. Some days you forget your password. And then there are the days when you sing “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)” with Bono at soundcheck and wind up backstage at Chicago’s United Center on the front lines of rock 'n roll with The Edge and Adam Clayton a few hours later. “If this is the front line,” Edge deadpans, glancing around the comfy digs, “we’re pretty comfortable.”
Comfortable maybe, but never coasting. U2 has spent four decades collecting platinum records and think pieces, somehow managing to remain both adored and exhaustingly divisive. “I guess it means we must be irritating someone somewhere,” Edge shrugs. “Maybe that’s a good thing. The worst thing to be is unobjectionable… unnoticed.” Adam’s less diplomatic: “If you don’t like U2, you’re just not trying hard.”
Songs of Innocence had them poking through their teenage years, a nightly excavation of formative trauma and basement-level ambition. Edge says the songs morph over time, accruing depth they didn’t know was there. “A song like ‘I Will Follow’ started out abstract,” he says. “Looking back, you realize it’s Bono writing from the moment he lost his mother. It’s probably the spur that made him an artist.” Clayton likens the setlist to a living diary: “When you go back to those songs, you play them with a different perspective. In some ways we’re playing them better now than when we wrote them.”
Musically, the nostalgia trip was less about mimicry than muscle memory. “We actually try to avoid direct references,” Edge says. “But we’re the same four guys, shaped by the same music, so certain things creep in.” Even when a track like “Every Breaking Wave” brushes up against Joshua Tree territory, it’s more accident than blueprint. “If things start to sound like previous albums, it’s almost against the grain of what we’re trying to achieve.”
That instinct for reinvention has been U2’s true addiction. “The only time we get really excited is when we feel like we’re doing something unique and different,” Edge says. “We came through punk, when everything was being reinvented. We’ve made it our business to avoid traditional rock forms most of the time.” He still hears their 1980 debut Boy and wonders where some of its “out of the box” moments came from: “We knew so little about composition we just experimented. Through playfulness and trial and error, we hit on ideas from a completely different world.”
Thirty-plus years in, they’re still convinced there’s another note hiding in the cracks. “Somehow we think we can find another note in there,” Edge says with a grin. Songs of Experience, the companion to Innocence, will be, in Adam’s words, “a little rawer” in sound. But as always, they’ll know what it really is only when they finish it. “Until it’s done,” Clayton says, “it’s hard to comment.”
Hard to comment, maybe, but easy to believe: some days really are better than others.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
