U2: Hymns for the Future
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH, EVEN FOR BONO. Lincoln behind him, Obama to his right, a crowd of 400,000 stretched to the Washington Monument. A chance to quote the “I have a dream” speech from the very spot where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered it. “Not a bad gig,” U2‘s singer says with a grin, shaking his head afterward in the band’s cramped backstage trailer. Bono’s eyes are hidden under orange shades; his close-cropped hair has a section shaved to the scalp on each side, like racing stripes for his brain. “That crowd! I suppose the fact that I thought I could bond with every single one of them is early — or later — signs of megalomania.” But Bono can’t help thinking about his original plan: King on the video screens, his 1963 speech ringing out again on the National Mall — and when the crowd heard “Thank God almighty, we are free at last,” U2 would have slammed into “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Instead, the song got a muted intro from Samuel L. Jackson. “They pulled the speech last night,” sighs Bono, still wearing a black scarf from his stage outfit, with a Rilke poem about God and nature printed on it. “We were out with [David] Axelrod and Rahm [Emanuel] and the Obama team, and they said it was a modesty thing. They thought it was presumptuous. Do you get that? I mean, it’s great that they’re being cautious — but it would have been great for the King family to see that.”
The Edge, uncharacteristically giddy-after the performance’s adrenaline blast, chimes in. “I can see how they were thinking,” he says. “I’m not sure I agree. Obama is a modest guy, and he’s really careful about being presumptuous and self-lionizing.” The guitarist pauses and smiles, eyes gleaming beneath his black ski cap. “We don’t suffer from these problems. We just go for it.”
A few weeks earlier, U2 finished their 11th studio album, No Line on the Horizon — which fuses the spiritual uplift of their Eighties work with the future-shock sonics of their Nineties albums. The result is some of the most moving, adventurous music of their career, from the churning polyrhythms of the title track to the ghostly minimalism of the closer, “Cedars of Lebanon.” And despite living in a time where, as Bono puts it, “only teenage girls and very, very honest people” pay for music, they spared neither time nor expense in pursuit of their vision.
“It is now easier and more affordable to record a song than at any other time in the history of recorded music,” says bassist Adam Clayton. “Unless you’re U2.” It was a superstar album-as-art project, with no deadlines on the horizon: During two years of scattered sessions, they recorded in France, London, New York, Dublin and Fez, Morocco. Longtime producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno were along for the ride, with the pair emerging as full song-writing partners for the first time — it was Lanois, for instance, who came up with the chorus melody for a key track, “Moment of Surrender.”
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