We don’t mind if we’re humiliated to find a great song. But why did we end up working on Broadway? The American songbook! If I could impart one thing to you in this exchange it’s that I’m a student, and so is my friend Edge. “The Boy Falls From the Sky” is an amazing song so is “Turn Off the Dark.” The thing got into trouble. The song has to be so good that it gets passed around and people hold on to it for dear life. He’s going, “Is it that call again?” “What call?” “The one about we’re going to write the big -off rock song?” And I say, “Yeah, it’s our job!” We can make songs famous now, but I don’t think U2 can make them hits.ĭoes that change anything for how you operate? It’s just much harder to sneak into the unconscious minds of your audience. So right now I want to write the most unforgiving, obnoxious, defiant, -off-to-the-pop-charts rock ’n’ roll song that we’ve ever made. Or “Every Breaking Wave” or “The Troubles” on “Songs of Innocence.” I would have loved to have a pop song on the radio. “Songs of Experience” is great songwriting even if you don’t like the sound of it. I wished to connect with the pop charts over the last two albums and failed. Is the pop-culture world still a place where U2 can realistically compete for attention? I know now that with youth culture I am kind of tolerated hanging out at the back of the birthday party but the magic show’s going on down here for the kids. It’s more about where your music fits into the culture. Lex van Rossen/MAI/Redferns, via Getty Images But is what Eddie and you were hinting at the promotion around the music?īono (foreground) with his bandmates, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr., in 1980. The second half of your question was: Are you still in competition? Yes, in terms of songwriting. That’s what that conversation with Ed was about. Art can’t be empirical, mostly, but sometimes you can say that’s a better song than that one. I wanted to see U2’s songwriting grow in competition. They have a phrase: “in competition.” They also show films at Cannes that are not in competition. I did use the word “competition.” I was referring to the Cannes Film Festival. I didn’t use the phrase “horse race” with my mate, Ed. Does that suggest, on your part, a declining interest in winning the race? Good question, but faulty intelligence. I was thinking about that in the context of the new book and the last two U2 albums, each of which were about taking stock rather than making claims on the present or looking forward. So he was saying that you described making music to him as like owning a race horse and when U2’s horse is in the race they want it to win, whereas his band, Pearl Jam, wants their horse to run the race and then run free. This is maybe an odd place to start, but I interviewed Eddie Vedder this year and he said that you two once had a conversation about - I’ve pushed his car! He has lugged our gear! He’s a blood brother! That’s why I wrote the book: These different characters are all part of me.” “It’s not like you’re creative when you’re being a musician and when you’re an activist, you’re being an activist. “There is no single strand to the creative life,” says Bono, who is 62 and, to put it mildly, a spirited conversationalist. Whatever your view of the man, there is surely plenty of material to support your arguments in his hefty and sprawling new memoir, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” which will be published on Nov. Despite, or in various ways because of, such undertakings, he’s also a somewhat polarizing figure, seen in certain corners as a sanctimonious do-gooder, an embodiment of the musical and political establishment. He’s also a prominent activist, having helped lead campaigns that resulted in some of the world’s richest countries’ forgiving its loans to some of the world’s poorest and in procuring tens of billions of dollars in AIDS relief for African nations. He is, as you may know, the lead singer of U2, one of the most successful and longest-running rock bands of all time. There are different Bonos to different people, including the man himself.
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