- 2023-03-18
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MUSIC
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U2 Releases New Album “Songs of Surrender”, Performs at NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
Irish rock band U2, consisting of Bono (vocals), The Edge (guitar), Adam Clayton (bass) and Larry Mullen Jr.(drums), released their re-recording album “Songs of Surrender” on March 17, 2023.
The album comprises re-recorded and reinterpreted versions of 40 songs from the group's back catalogue, many in stripped-down and acoustic arrangements.
The album is a companion to Bono's 2022 memoir, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story”, which was structured into 40 chapters titled after U2 songs.
Bono told Apple Music, “Songs of Surrender is only possible because of so much amazing momentum for the future. And to be fair, we have a drummer who is injured and can't be playing rock ’n’ roll. And so if we take this interest in acoustic music and intimacy being the new punk rock - which it is - I really believe in the force of intimacy and these earbuds and the way we listen to music now.”
The Edge said, “Suddenly we had the space and time to just make music without there being any kind of pressure or any expectation. This idea I'd been knocking around for a while was to try some more of our songs in a stripped-down way that we had done over the years. But also the joy of it was there was no necessity to put it out if we didn't like it.”- oxo-loXdcH0
- oxo-loXdcH0
Bono and The Edge explained about some tracks for the album via Apple Music.
“Stories for Boys”
Bono: “I guess it's a teenage fantasy, kind of, but it's not sketched out. And then for this collection, not only did we sketch it out, Edge sang it, and it's quite unsettled. And it has a whole other resonance.”
The Edge: “We were writing it now about ourselves as we were—boys, back in 1979 when we first started that song. From the safety of this amount of distance of time and experience, you can actually look at who we were and finish out that lyric, which we could never have written at the time.”
“Bad”
Bono: “Some songs, I almost trembled to sing them. And making this song, which is about my friend who nearly lost his life a couple of ways—as a child in a bombing, in a terrorist bomb attack in our city, and then later to heroin. And then to ask the question, 'Can I sing that?' Because I must be an addict too. I'm not quite sure of what is my drug of choice, but I have things clearly I need to let go of. I rewrote it in the first person, and it was really hard and really easy to sing at the same time.”
“All I Want Is You”
Bono: “I reveal this trick that I did on 'All I Want Is You' where I was singing from the point of view of the muse: 'So you say you want a diamond on a ring of gold.' As you hear it as a U2 fan, you think that's Bono singing to his wife. And when you realize, no, that's his wife singing to him saying, 'I don't need this.' And so it was nice to be able to really declare that and to go to the text and the melody and treat it with some respect.”
“If God Will Send His Angels”
The Edge: “You know, the thing is, I realized that we'd not really fully underscored the melody right. We'd left it very abstract and the melody was much better than the song would suggest. So I changed the chords, changed a lot of the stuff. Same melody, same lyrics, but it's a better song now.”
Bono: “Not the same lyrics.”
The Edge: “Oh, that's right. We changed the lyrics.”
“City of Blinding Lights”
The Edge: “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. The same is true for a lot of them, where you're hearing it in a different way. And that's, I think, why [Bono] 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 wasn't there before.”-
Bono and The Edge appeared on NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert to perform “Beautiful Day”, “In a Little While”, “Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of”, and “Walk On”.
This time, Bono and The Edge, both played with Duke Ellington School of the Arts Choir.
“All of these years trying to avoid a desk job, but actually it's really good. I love it.” The Edge joked. “I'm getting into it.”
Before perform “Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of”, written for the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, Bono said, “This song's actually a song about friendship sort of. Edge and myself were discussing earlier how we've gotten a little maybe more intolerant as we've gotten older of our friends. I've made the mistake of putting my friends into categories like boxes two boxes you should never do this. The really difficult ones, you have to be careful what you say around them kind of thing and then the ones that you know are easy with and I've worsened that I found myself spending more time with ones that I'm really easy with and not having the arguments that you really need to have with your friends and they need to have with you. This is for Michael Hutchence is a great friend and great singer and I wished that I had this conversation. It's kind of an argument this song. It's not really resolved me and Michael will work it out another time.”
Also, he said of “Walk On”, “The moment we were in that day a war was breaking out Ukraine and a stand-up comedian was standing up to the bully that was Vladimir Putin standing up for freedom, so we re-wrote our song 'Walk On' for him and the upstanding people of Ukraine and we are going to play a few right now.”
Photo by Olaf Heine
Background photo by Estefania Mitre - source : Apple Music
