Apple Music’s Zane Lowe joins U2’s Bono and The Edge on a road trip across the desert and a journey through 'Songs Of Surrender', their new collection of reworked classics out tomorrow. In the extensive interview, the pair discuss the impetus for stripping down their songs for the project, the longevity and legacy of the band, Bono’s unwavering devoting to the group and why he most identifies as a songwriter, activism and not taking themselves as seriously as others, commercialism and ambition, and bringing mischief to Las Vegas when they launch the MSG Sphere venue this fall. Plus, Bono spontaneously shares a pre-written apology letter detailing everything he’s sorry for.
U2 Tell Apple Music Why The Band Decided To Strip Down Their Songs For the ‘Songs of Surrender’ Project…
The Edge: Our songs are the boss, and they were through this whole project. They told us what to do. I think it was a lot of opportunism because of the lockdown. Suddenly we had the space and time to just make music without there being any kind of pressure or any expectation. And this idea, I'd been knocking around for a while, to try some more of our songs in a stripped down way that we had done over the years. In our show, we'd take a song Every Breaking Wave, and we'd bring it down to piano, or Staring at the Sun, bring it down to acoustic guitar and voice. This was a golden opportunity to see where it would take us. But also the joy of it was there was no necessity to put it out if we didn't like it. We could just do it and see how it worked. So we could really just enjoy the process. It was really amazing fun.
Bono: It's both a vanity project and a grudge match. The grudge match is, we were trying to prove, or else maybe obfuscate, was if our songs could stand up with the best songs, our favorite songs. And so that was it. We wanted to see. It was some trepidation. Will they stand up? People say your songs are like your children. Wrong. Your songs are like your parents. They tell you what to do, how to dress in, and to turn up for work, in the video, whatever. They do boss you about the songs, but, after a while, if you're successful, and as a songwriter, songs become big. They're owned by other people, not you. And in with this collection, we were sort of trying to listen to them again and trying to think, well, first of all, will they hold up? Will they stand up to being broken down outside of the firepower of a rock and roll band like U2? Because the songs, if they're any good, they never end. But rock and roll bands, they do.
The Edge Tells Apple Music About The Overarching Idea For ’Songs of Surrender’...
...just serving the songs... was the overarching idea for this collection. And to serve the song, but to serve the voice, which meant the voice was the centerpiece of every single arrangement. So what's fun is to hear things like City of Blinding Lights, which sounds like a completely different song lyric to me, because Bono's interpreting it in a way that he couldn't possibly have done with the rock version. And not just this, other songs. The same is true for a lot of them, where you're hearing it in a different way. And that's, I think, why you went for new lyrics in a lot of songs is because there was a kind of opportunity there, there was a platform to deliver lyrics that weren’t; there before.
Bono Shares His Apology Letter…
Edge is the most influential guitar player in 35 years. The only person who won't say that is him. The band has staked out extraordinary musical landscape. The subject matter's been interesting. We've got a singer that has an annoying gene, but we need a bit of bottle in our rock and roll singers. Right? Actually, I've got an apology. I wrote it. “I apologize for having the unreasonableness of youth as I enter my 60s. I apologize for being a singer who will get in your face whatever direction you're looking. I apologize for not being shy or retiring and for loudly giving thanks for where I go to work. I apologize for stretching our band to its elastic limit. I apologize for wanting to make an unreasonable guitar record that rattles my cage and others. I apologize for repeating over and over, that rock and roll is not dead, it's just older and grumpier, and occasionally makes fireworks out of its mood changes. But most of all, I apologize for apologizing.”
Bono Tells Apple Music About His Unwavering Devotion to Making Music with U2...
It's a lot of things I want to do in my life, but it turns out there's a devotion that is required now for the song, for songwriting and for the band. There's only one thing that I need to do and that is to make music because if I don't do that, I'm in trouble. And I don't want to make music with anybody else other than Edge, and Adam or Larry. If I can have that, I want that. But it requires a kind of a pledge. It's like you're teenagers again. It's like you're going to go there. Some people might say, "You know what? I can't do that." And that would be totally understandable. It might even be mature. It might even be sane, is to say, if you think that I can commit to this like we did when we were kids, you're out of your mind. That's what it requires for me. I mean, each member of the band has their own decision to make, but I'm clear. I mean, this is what I want to do. This is what I do with all my time at the moment, is work on new songs. Even though we're here to talk about Songs of Surrender, it's the new songs that get me awake at night. Songs of Surrender is only possible because the so much amazing momentum for new work and for the future.
The Edge on Why U2 is Still Together, Friendship, and The Band’s Dynamic…
The thing about your friends is you get to choose them. Right? You don't choose your family. And I think our band luckily found each other as friends first and then, lo and behold, we found out that we actually weren't bad as songwriters and performers. But also the way we're designed, we're not in competition. So it's not like Lennon and McCartney where these two guys who the rivalry probably made them better. They're also basically doing the same thing. Singers and songwriters. I do a lot of music composition, but I need Bono to finish the song, so we complement each other. We don't ever cancel each other out. It's additive. So we shine brighter working together than we ever could on our own and I think that's why the band is still together, as much as the friendships are sort of the same, meaning, the friendships are real and they work.
U2 Tell Apple Music How American Culture Influenced The Band in The Early Days…
Bono: …we came to America to look for America at a time when America was looking for itself. America was trying to discover who it was in the 80s again, it was got a bit lost. And so it was an amazing time to arrive in America. And for us, a lot of our versions of America were from music, but also from books. City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, reading the plays of Sam Shepherd, Patti Smith, poems of Allen Ginsburg brought us to the... I mean, the Joshua Tree, I don't think... His America was really... And Howl. These were important tracts for us.
The Edge: And also Wim Wenders. Remember Paris, Texas? That was a huge movie. To see America through a European eye like that was important for us.
Bono Tells Apple Music Why He Identifies First and Foremost as a Songwriter and Explains His Longstanding Creative Partnership with The Edge…
We share our songwriting in U2. And the reason we do that is because, well, Larry and Adam make those songs valuable. So there's an economic aspect. The other reason is because through improvisation, that's how Larry and Adam normally contribute to the songs. And so that… it was also good advice from our manager, Paul McGuinness at the time. But the only thing of it is that, and this is the vanity bit, Edge and I more and more revered ‘the song’. I used to be saying, "Well, what did you do with your life?" "I'm in a band." "What do with your life." "I'm an activist." "What'd you do with your life?" "I'm a singer." But now I would say I'm a songwriter. I'm a performer, I'm a songwriter first. The text is everything. The melodies are everything. And there are great songwriting couples, duos, duets, duals. And this is, I've been working with Ed since I was 16 and we've been writing songs together and he's the musical genius. He comes with the magic and I helped shape it and I try to put into words what's in the music. Then I come to him also with music.It's often not as genius, but he makes it so.
Bono Tells Apple Music Why Faith Is Required For Songwriting…
The faith is required for songwriting. Ask any jazz artist, any people. You jump in off and hoping you land on a particular cord or place. And then I suppose, I think the scriptures say "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for but not seen." So when you're a kid and you don't have anything at all to offer the world, at least it feels like that. And you're at a place in your life and in your country's life where there doesn't look like there's going to be a lot out there, you need faith. And we found it in each other. We found it in music. We had a certain religiosity is the truth. Even though Ireland is dividing along sectarian lines, it's nearly at civil war. So we reject formal religion, but we find our own way and music's the language of the spirit anyway. But that's where we connect with our music and that's at the heart of who we are is faith. And the idea then that the world is more malleable than you think. That it's not stuck in stone. You can kick it, you can caress it, you can kiss it, you can push it, you can shape it.
The Edge Tells Apple Music About U2’s Activism, Earnestness, and Not Taking Themselves As Seriously as Others…
I think that's why it was so important for us to make the album like Achtung Baby and the tour that followed Zoo TV, because we'd start, started to become caricatures on that basis, like the Joshua Tree period had way over exaggerated this sense of earnestness and responsibility. And we just had to own up and say, “Actually… We’re very silly, we're not those characters.” We absolutely set out to offer ourselves to serve in some shape or form in U2 as a band and through our music, but we were also not taking ourselves nearly as seriously as people thought we were. And we were able to laugh at ourselves. And Achtung Baby was that antidote for us as much as for music fans to that overly sanctimonious, pious and earnest sort of image that had grown up around us. We needed to flesh out the truth about who we were and give ourselves the freedom then to be in both. Because that was the thing we loved about Bob Marley. He was able to, without any issues, like blend the spiritual into the political…Sexual, there was no to him, these weren't different baskets. These were all part of who he was.
Bono Tells Apple Music About Bringing The Sphere to Las Vegas and Continuing To Push Boundaries…
The mischief now is to bring a cathedral to Las Vegas. There happens to be one. It's called Guardian Angel Cathedral, it's one Catholic cathedral. We're bringing another. It's called the Sphere. And we are going to make a cathedral right off the strip in Las Vegas. We're going to make much mischief there. There will be much delight. It'll be delightful. We're going to take our live show to the next level. All we've tried to do from the beginning is break that fourth wall where you look at the camera. Well, for us, the case was we would jump off stage. I would jump into the crowd, climb, try to break the fourth wall. Then we started doing it with technology; videos, turning them into video art. The satellite stage could only exist because of ear monitors that allowed you to go in front of the speaker stack. That's how the satellite stage was invented. We invented it. And our shows have always been pushing at the outer perimeters, really. And this is the next level. This is how we hopefully take ourselves and our audience to the next level. We're choosing Achtung Baby as it's the right place for such mischief, because the fly was always headed to Las Vegas. It's a place where people come to be entertained. This is different. We're going to Oz. This is the yellow brick road.
Bono on Commercialism, Ambition and the Hip Hop Genre’s Embrace of Corporations...
Bono: …back to Achtung Baby period, because you're right, that was at that moment there was this idea that anything that was commercial had no authenticity. That to be pure and to have your work be taken seriously, you had to be pure and anti-commercial. Which, if you think about it, if you're trying to make out an album, is a ridiculous position to take. If you make an album, you want people to hear what you've done, which means that you have to have your records in the stores and lots of people buy them. So you want to promote your record, do the things that every band has always done. There's a difference between allowing your music to be tainted by a bad use, a bad association where you're cheapening what you're doing. But we never had any problem with ambition, nor did any of the bands that we looked up to …so the "corporation" word was a pejorative in the 80s, but of course hip hop came along and said, "Hold on a second.” And we think about what we're doing. We are our own industry. Coming out of Compton, if you're D re or Kendrick, it's not a sellout to set up your stall and to be selling your wares. So there was a beautiful honesty that came from hip hop.
The Edge Tells Apple Music About Always Searching For The Next Song…
...if you are lucky enough to be in the position that we're in where we have some songs that are revered, what else would you want to do with your life? What else would you want to do with your day than...get another one.
