He took the task seriously, crafting thoughtful new ways into these compositions, not just campfire singalongs. Songs of Surrender (which follows 2014’s Songs of Innocence and 2017’s Songs of Experience) was Edge’s lockdown project, and he’s the album’s primary producer, with assists from a few other folks, most notably Bob Ezrin, whose credits include KISS, Alice Cooper, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. On the other hand, the first song of the package is “One” and the fortieth is “40”-well played, boys. Instead, a dozen of the selections differ. It’s also part of a multi-year phase during which U2, which spent decades insistently focused on the future, has been looking back: They did a massive tour performing 1987’s The Joshua Tree album in full in 20, will soon be opening the new Sphere venue in Las Vegas with a show built around 1991’s Achtung Baby, and Bono recently published a best-selling memoir.Ī confusing note: That book is titled Surrender and consists of forty chapters, each named for a U2 song, so one might reasonably expect that Songs of Surrender would contain those same forty songs. (Songs from almost all fourteen of their albums are included nothing from 1981’s October or 2009’s No Line on the Horizon made the cut.) But this sprawling set represents a big swing from a group that’s never been afraid to take big swings-a grand statement about a Hall of Fame band’s songwriting legacy. There’s a grand tradition of rock stars stripping down or reworking their material, from Elvis in the boxing ring on the “comeback special” to the MTV Unplugged series to pretty much every time Bob Dylan steps on stage. Inevitably, it’s a bit hit-or-miss, and likely not essential for those who aren’t superfans, but there are many pleasures and discoveries to be found. Consider the scene in the 2008 guitar documentary It Might Get Loud, when The Edge switches off all his pedals and effects-the rig that Bono once described to me as looking “like Cape Canaveral”-to show that the swaggering introduction to “Elevation” is actually just him plinking two simple chords.īut with their new collection Songs of Surrender, their first release in six years, Ireland’s Finest are taking that plunge, reinterpreting forty songs from their catalog with new arrangements that are mostly intimate and acoustic, and frequently replacing Edge’s electric arsenal with quiet keyboards. ![]() If there’s one band whose body of work challenges this rule completely, though, it’s U2, who have always been defined by the totality of their expansive, atmospheric sound more than just their words and notes on a page. Which is true to a point-but also plays into the idea that music production is somehow cheating, that sonic treatments are there to cover up flaws, not serve as actual compositional tools. It has been said that you can measure the greatness of a song if it holds up accompanied by just a guitar or a piano.
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