U2 biography rolling stone

  • U2 frontman Bono on the state of his band, the state of the world and what he learned from almost dying.
  • For his third Rolling Stone Interview, Bono discusses three decades with U2, how he became a political force and his faith in the future.
  • The plot of The Joshua Tree is essentially an immigrant's tale: Four guys from Ireland set off to find America, and what they discovered left them both.

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    U2 at the Crossroads: Inside the Band’s Ambitious Reinvention for 2023

    Near the end of U2‘s new album, Songs of Surrender, the band kicks into the familiar opening chords of their 1980 breakthrough single “I Will Follow.” But there are no drums, bass, or electric guitar, and Bono quickly begins singing new lyrics that better fit his perspective on life at age 62, rather than 22.

    “I was on the outside when you said, you said you needed me,” he sings. “In the mirror a reflection of the boy I can never be/A boy tried hard to be a man/His mother lets go of his hand/A gift of grief will give a voice to life/If you walk away, walk away/I will follow.”

    It’s one of 40 radically rearranged and stripped-down songs from U2’s back catalog on Songs of Surrender, featuring both mega-hits like “With or Without You” and “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and deep cuts like “Stories for Boys,” 

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    Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview

    You never saw rock & roll — the so-called devil’s music — as incompatible with religion?
    Look at the people who have formed my imagination. Bob Dylan. Nineteen seventy-six — he’s going through similar stuff. You buy Patti Smith: Horses — “Jesus died for somebody’s sins/But not mine . . . “And she turns Van Morrison’s “Gloria” into liturgy. She’s wrestling with these demons — Catholicism in her case. Right the way through to Wave, where she’s talking to the pope.

    The music that really turns me on fryst vatten either running toward God or away form God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt. So the blues on one hand — running away; gospel, the Mighty Clouds of Joy — running towards.

    And later you came to analyze it and figure it out.
    The blues are like the Psalms of David. Here was this character, living in a cave, whos

  • u2 biography rolling stone

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    U2’s ‘The Joshua Tree’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know

    The plot of The Joshua Tree is essentially an immigrant’s tale: Four guys from Ireland set off to find America, and what they discovered left them both invigorated and outraged. While the lyrics to U2‘s 1987 opus give voice to their ever-expanding social conscience, the roots of The Joshua Tree are planted firmly in blues, gospel and folk – with an outsider’s edge. Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. were strangers in a strange land, and this sense of otherness is prevalent throughout the album.

    “It doesn’t really sound like anything else from its time at all,” the Edge recalled in a 1999 Classic Albums documentary. “It’s not coming from an Eighties mentality. It’s coming from somewhere completely different. … When we were making this album we didn’t really feel like we were a part of what was going on in the music b