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YouTube - U2 - Beautiful Day
[...] Lyrically, Bono says the song is about "a person who loses everything and has never been happier. It's a song about taking stock of the important things in life."
(from "Track By Track -- U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind" by Larry Flick, Billboard magazine, September 29, 2000)
BONO: [...] Actually, there's kind of a space theme to this album.
A space theme?
BONO: Making this record it was coming up to the millennium and they were kind of replaying the whole century on TV. They were showing shots of the Apollo moon landing one night and, I'm sure this goes for a lot of people, but they're the ones when I was a child that really showed me the size of the Earth -- how tiny it was and how big the universe was and how full of possibilities and danger and potential -- you know, all of these things. And there's a little bit of it on a lot of songs on the album. It just kind of bleeds in.
Where exactly?
BONO: Like in the middle of "Beautiful Day" -- in this song about a guy who loses everything but has never felt better -- you have this hard cut to all the stuff the astronauts spotted from orbit. The Bedouin fires, the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon, all those things. And I do like that idea of going from the domestic to the... extra-terrestrial.
(from "The Final Frontier" by Olaf Tyaransen, Hot Press, October 26, 2000)
All That You Can't Leave Behind closes the cycle in a rush of clean arrangements and heady choruses. And it works: "Beautiful Day," the band's first single in two years, topped the Australian charts in a single bound two weeks ago, as it did elsewhere.
The makeover is not purely cosmetic. The song's opening lines, "The heart is a bloom / Shoots up through the stony ground," is a reaffirmation of hope against great odds, a classic U2 theme if ever there was one. Bono agrees it strikes a kind of keynote to the whole experience.
"I think sometimes if you lose everything, it's as good a place to start as any," he says. "That's kinda what the song's about. I know somebody who lost pretty much everything: had a terminal illness, gave up their job, everything, 'cause they wanted to smell the flowers while they can, and they just had the best time ever.
"It turned out they were wrongly diagnosed, but they never went back. You know, sometimes the moment when the house is falling down around your ears and your friends have all deserted you is actually when you get started."
(from "Rock Of Age Is Harder To Do" by Michael Dwyer, The Age, October 27, 2000)
MTVi News: How did "Beautiful Day" come together, and why was that the right one to start with, as a single and on the album?
Bono: It's optimistic. It's just an up idea, that you can lose everything, and somehow find yourself, you know. And, you know, you can lose your girlfriend, your house; everything's going wrong. And the character in the song is just, he never felt better (laughs). And, it's a little haiku perhaps, or Zen, but it's just a great idea, and you know, optimistic. To write music that's up, that isn't schlock, is quite hard. It's much easier to paint with black.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
YouTube - U2 Stuck In A Moment(...) ACOUSTIC -GREAT AND RARE!
One of the finest songs on All That You Can't Leave Behind is called "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," and it is an argument between someone committing suicide and his angry friend. In public, Bono has been edging around the song, but at Irving Plaza, for the first time, he introduces it quite plainly: "This is a song about friendship," he says. "It's for a good friend… Michael Hutchence."
"I don't know why I felt uncomfortable to do that," he tells me. "I just wanted to do that." (Hutchence died of asphyxiation in an Australian hotel room in Sydney in 1997. His death was ruled a suicide, though his partner, Paula Yates, who herself died of an overdose last September, argued he lost his life in a solitary sex game that went wrong.)
Bono talks about the times he and Hutchence spent together in the two years after 1993's Zooropa tour. For much of that time, Bono and the Edge lived in a house in France: "A couple of years of pure joy, just listening to music, and people came from far and wide to stay. I grew a beard, put on a few pounds and drank a lot of whiskey, and it was the most extraordinary life, just one of those stupid times when you fall in love with music and everything." (It was the spirit of that long party they originally intended to capture on their last album, Pop, but characteristically, the mission altered: "It's like a party for two songs, and then it's the hangover.")
Some nights they would be sitting outside, having a drink at one in the morning, and Hutchence would just appear. He'd climb in over the gates. And they'd go out. One night they ended up sleeping on the beach.
"The first verse, it's really very defensive," he says. (It begins, "I'm not afraid of anything in this world / There's nothing you can throw at me that I haven't already heard.") "I think other people who have lost a mate to suicide will all tell you the same thing -- just the overpowering guilt that you weren't there for that person. As anyone around here will tell you, friendship is a thing that I hold very sacred. Cocteau, I think he only wrote one serious essay in his life, and it was on the subject of friendship -- friendship is higher than love. He goes on about how it's less glamorous, less passionate, less everything, but perhaps endures and comes from as deep a place. So it really threw me. Can you really be that busy that you don't notice your mate on the slide, as it were? I am the most loyal, and the most unreliable, friend. It's the way I am -- I forget phone numbers… I don't use the phone for fun now… So I just remember feeling this overpowering sense of guilt. And then anger. And annoyance. That song is an argument. It's a row between mates. You're kind of trying to slap somebody around the face, trying to wake them up out of an idea. In my case it's a row. Although, oddly enough, we discussed suicide a few times. And we both agreed how pathetic it was."
[...]
You're confident that it was suicide?
Pause. "You know, I'd love to think that he went out on some spectacular sexual maneuver, but knowing the state of him at that time, I don't think so. But I'm sure of this: If he had lasted half an hour longer, he would be alive now. He couldn't see past, he couldn't see out that half an hour. And apparently that's what people do… and a friend of his told me that he'd brought up our conversation a few days before that."
[...]
How did the argument in the song form in your head?
"Being right there. Just wanting to be in that half hour. So in the song, I'm right there -- it's like, just wanting to be in that half an hour. I wanted to have that argument in that half an hour. But I didn't put down that it was about Michael Hutchence because, for me, songs, I never make things specific to anything. And I didn't feel comfortable saying it while Paula was alive, because I knew it was important to her that he didn't commit suicide. But he did, and we have to say that. And I know the people that he called that night, and I know." By now, Bono's eyes are as you know they must be. "I felt the biggest respect I could pay him was not to write some stupid soppy fucking song, so I wrote a really tough, nasty little number. Sort of, you know, slapping him around the head. And I'm sorry, but that's how it came out for me."
So it just basically says: If you stay stuck in this suicidal moment, you're an idiot?
"Just, come on, you know. Come on."
(from "Comeback of the year" by Chris Heath, Rolling Stone, May 2000)
There's a quality of philosophical acceptance of mortality, though. There is no fear of death in the lyrics.
[Bono:] "No, there's not. It feels fearless to me, the album. The opening line of 'Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of' is 'I'm not afraid of anything in this world'. A pop song starts with that, you have to back it up. That was written for a friend of mine who committed suicide, and it's an argument with him. But it's sort of a declaration of your own position: it's got that attitude of, you know, when your jaw sticks out, like you do before a row. It's like somebody's in a stupor and you're trying to wake them up, 'cause the cops are coming, and they're sitting at the wheel and you're trying to get them out of the car cause they're gonna crash it. I wondered why the first verse was so first person? Why was it about me when I was writing a song about a mate? And I realised it was a defence because I felt so guilty. The original opening line was 'I'm not afraid of anything in this world / But when I see what it's done to you, then I'm scared'. Imagine making pop music out of all this! (Laughs). There's a thing!"
(from "Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot Press, December 15, 2000)
Amazon.co.uk: That said [Bono's comments on the allegedly autobiographical nature of "New York"], as the song stands you don't really go out of your way to distance yourself from the character.
Bono: That's true. I suppose Michael Hutchence (INXS frontman) left anyone who knew him with the feeling of... be very careful how close to the ledge you walk. If there's anyone being heckled on the record, it's probably myself. That's always the way with songwriters, really -- you preach what you need to hear yourself, so I'm sure that's finally what "Stuck in a Moment," for example, is about.
(from an interview at Amazon UK)
YouTube - U2 - Elevation {Live In Milan Italy}
YouTube - U2 - Walk On @ 2002 Grammy Awards
We are talking about the song "Walk On," the one that provides the album's title. It is dedicated to (and loosely refers to) the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who stayed to oppose the totalitarian regime in Burma rather than be with her husband and son. Bono pauses for a long time, trying to work out how to explain something. "If you've ever had a fright in your life, someone close to you dies, or whatever," he begins, "things come into sharp focus and you just… suddenly some people become more important to you than others. Some ideas become more important to you than others. I think the Dalai Lama says, 'Begin with death, start from there, and you won't go far wrong.'" Bono chuckles. "I don't think he was just having a bad day. Christ says, I think, in the Sermon on the Mount, 'If you love your life too much, you've already lost it.' Which is an interesting one. As a younger man I remember I didn't understand what that meant, because I loved life. You're holding on so tight to it you're incapable of doing anything with it. It's about fear."
But, I put to him, the phrase "all that you can't leave behind" is talking about death, isn't it?
"Yeah." He tries to explain the reasons why he no longer feels the reckless immortality he assumed when he was twenty, and alludes to a recent private crisis he'd rather not specify. "It's hard for me to talk about in particular. I think I'd rather just say I had a bit of a fright, a shock of some kind, and leave it at that. But it wasn't really just people close to me being sick or Michael Hutchence dying…" Then he adds, "I think Michael Hutchence's death really threw me, and my father got sick, and it was just one of those years. Everything came into sharp focus for me. There's a lot of genuine love of life on that record."
Despite that spirit, I can't think of a record besides Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind more concerned with mortality…
"Right. And he had a fright."
(from "Comeback of the year" by Chris Heath, Rolling Stone, May 2000)
MTVi News: "Walk On" is another track that really seemed central to the album. You took the album title from the lyrics...
Bono: It was inspired by a Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her struggle for free elections in Burma. She left her comfort of her home in Oxford, as an academic, and her family and her son and her husband, and went to do the right thing for her people. And it was just one of the great acts of courage in the 20th century. And it's continuing into the 21st century, and her life is -- she's been under house arrest for some time now, and people get, you know, we all get very worried about how she's doing. At first, I was writing it from the point of view of her family, or her son, you know, her husband, and then in the end I kept it a little abstract and just let it be a love song about somebody having to leave a relationship for the right reasons.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
YouTube - U2 Kite live from Sydney November 13th 2006 Telstra Stadium
MTVi News: On "Kite," you sing of being "the last of the rock stars when hip-hop drove the big cars / in the time when new media / was the big idea." How close does that come to summing up your feelings about being in a big rock band in this age of hip-hop and rap-rock and teen pop?
Bono: I just kinda wanted to put a date on it. Like the way you might in a diary. And it was also some bait for rock critics who might get annoyed. I always feel it's one of our jobs in U2, as well as kind of singing your life, is just occasionally to annoy people. (Laughs) What do you mean "the last of the rock stars"? I could see a lot of people were gonna get cross with that one.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
"It's a reference," he [Bono] explains, "to an absurd moment of parenting, where I took a kite up on Killiney Hill with Jordan and Eve -- I'd been away, and wanted to do the dad thing. It was very Tommy Cooper -- the kite blew off the line and smashed to smithereens on the first flight, and Evie just asked if they could go home and play with their tamagotchis. So the song is about realising you have to let go of them at some point. Songwriting is still a surprise, because you often think you're describing one thing, and it just turns on its head. Suddenly I was back in a caravan site when I was a kid, and I realised that he had tried to do exactly the same thing with a kite, and it had gone equally badly. I realised I wasn't singing from quite as theoretical a place as I thought."
(from "Pro Bono" by Andrew Mueller, The Weekend Australian, December 01, 2001)
Did you bring "Kite" to his [Bono's father] attention or was he aware of it?
[Bono:] No. There's an odd one. I have this verse about taking the kids up on Killiney Hill with a kite. Then I realised, I went back in my head, and I remembered being in Rush or Skerries, one incident where exactly the same thing happened. We used to have a caravan, and I sort of felt the goodbye aspect of the song was not from me to him, but from him to me. That's the thing about songwriting -- you're the last to know what you're on about.
(from "Matter Of Life And Death" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press Annual 2002, December 01, 2001)
Chris Evans: "In a time of new media, that was the big idea" -- is written on this album. Obviously you now think that's not the big idea anymore.
Bono: Nope, that's the song "Kite" you're talking about there, that's a way of dating it. It's a very emotional song, "Kite," it's about letting go of somebody you love, we all have to do that, you know, whether it's a family or lovers or whatever, and I just wanted to put a date on it, it's no big comment.
(from Chris Evans Breakfast Show)
YouTube - U2 - In A Little While (Anaheim 2001)
The song came out of a jam with the band during the All That You Can't Leave Behind sessions. Bono has noted that his voice was in terrible shape at the time of the recording of this song. The lyrics refer to a hangover, in the vein of their Achtung Baby track "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World," which describes a person trying to get home drunk. However, Bono has noted in live performances that it became a gospel song after he heard that Joey Ramone, the iconic front man of the legendary punk band, The Ramones, listened to this song as his final one on his deathbed.
YouTube - U2 - Wild Honey (Elevation East Rutherford)
YouTube - Peace on Earth
Inside the hotel, he [Bono] sits at a table in the back of the closed restaurant and talks about the 1998 terrorist bombing in Northern Ireland that led him to write the angry "Peace on Earth."
"The bombing in Omagh traumatized the whole country," he says of the incident, which killed more than two dozen people including many children. "People were weeping openly on the street. They read all the names on the radio at 6 p.m. and all traffic stopped.
"There was a real stink in the air that Christmas in Dublin and Belfast. Children's choirs were on the pavement singing about peace on Earth, but it sounded out of tune."
(from "Far Down the Road, a Sudden U-Turn" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2000)
Time and again, he [Bono] comes across the accepted philosophy that the world is ruined, that there is no hope, that the System will always win and justice is a lie.
"That's the context that 'Peace on Earth' was written in," he says, plainly, of the album's most shockingly cynical song. "It was written from exactly that place. Literally on the day of the Omagh bomb. And the despair. And not just the lives that had been destroyed but the peace process and all these things... it was a joke. And then following through at Christmas, children singing 'Peace on earth, goodwill to all mankind' and you just think, 'Shut the f--k up.' Y'know? That's how people felt. I know Ali did. I didn't, and I don't know why, but I wrote their song. That thing of 'How could you talk about that? F--k off.' But I think the brave ones are the ones that drown it out, with a bigger noise, with a bigger idea. I don't think they're often stars. They're often mothers, firemen, working people who get on with their lives."
(from "Pop Smart" by Sylvia Patterson, Sunday Herald, November 05, 2000)
[Bono:] "'Peace On Earth' is so heavy. Just calling a song 'Peace on Earth' is like mud pie, right? You just wanna know where that guy parks his car (laughs). I'd wanna give somebody a slap for that! So it has to be a great song. It's a very bitter pill to swallow and it was written literally on the day the Omagh bomb went off, right then. Nobody could actually believe it. In Ireland, on the six o'clock news, when they read out the names of all the people who died the city came to a complete standstill. People were just weeping... in cars, on O'Connell Street, all over the place. It was really a trauma for most people. Because not only was it the destruction of the lives it was a destruction of the peace process, which had been put together with sticky tape and glue and tacks and a lot of faith. It seemed it was destroyed. It would be hard to describe to people who were not Irish what that felt like that day. It was certainly the lowest day in my life, outside of personal losses. I couldn't believe it, that people could do that. At that time. That Christmas, the whole 'peace on earth, goodwill to all men' struck a sour note. It was very hard to be a believer that Christmas. In the song, they are real names of victims of the bomb... but I also tried to bring it back to Cedarwood Road and growing up and my own violence, remembering all of that. There's a vanity in there: 'they say what you mock will overtake you / and you become a monster so the monster won't break you'. I put in a couple of my own aphorisms as if they are out there! (laughs) It's a terrible cheat as a writer but I'd love to get one of them off, you know? 'Oh yeah, they do say that, don't they?' No!"
(from "Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot Press, December 15, 2000)
Q: Does coming from Ireland, where there is a history of violence and terrorism, give you any added perspective on what has happened here [Sept. 11]?
A: [Bono:] There's a song on the album called "Peace on Earth" that talks about that, but I didn't want to do it in the show because there is such a bitterness to it. It vents a certain anger about how the killing just keeps going on. But someone at one of the shows held up this big banner that quoted one of the lines, "Their lives are bigger than any big idea," and I think that has struck a chord.
(from "Joy Makes a Return" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2001)
YouTube - U2 - when you look at the world
The song is about a person's faith being troubled by tragedy. It has been described by Bono as being told from "the point of view of someone who is having a crisis of faith looking at someone who has built their house upon the rock:.[1] "When I Look at the World" has also been described as being about the commitment of Ali Hewson towards Chernobyl and the victims of the tragedy.
YouTube - U2 New York live from the Irving Plaza 2000
Behind us, as we lounge on U2's waterside patio, the final mix of discursive travelogue "New York" wobbles out of a crap Sony boom box. With little Eve Hewson on his lap, Bono sings along...
"I hit an iceberg in my life / But here I am still afloat / Lose your balance, lose your wife / In the queue for the lifeboat / You've got to put the women and children first / But you've got an unquenchable thirst... for New York."
Like a few of Bono's characters on All That You Can't Leave Behind, the lyric outlines a man on a moral holiday, braving the temptations of escape and infidelity. Encouraging the theory that it's autobiographical is the fact that Bono has just bought an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
"It's important to describe your demons in order to deal with them," says Bono. "I have a side of me that wants to run really fast away from everything that you could call home and responsibilities. But I have another side, which is stronger, that draws me towards home and those very same responsibilities. When I'm at work I play out those things... but maybe if I hadn't found Ali and this community of people, then maybe I'm just lazy enough to have surrendered."
You kept in the bit about midlife crisis...
"I was seriously wondering whether to or not. Just looking at you when we played it to you in Dublin, I could see you writing the headline [laughs]. But it's just funnier, that line. From this character, it's believable."
Bono laughs, then frowns.
"It's not autobiography. It's quite the opposite in the sense that I'm coming out of a period: I have run off, I'm back now. I'm more at home... with myself. I had a bit of fright, basically, and the song 'Kite' comes out of that too. I hadn't been around for a while and was determined to do the proper Dad thing. I took the kids to Killiney Hill in Dublin county to fly a kite. Up it went and immediately down it came, and smashed to smithereens. The kids just looked at me: [affects unimpressed child look] 'Come on Dad, let's go and play some video games.' How cruel is that?"
(from "The Elastic Bono Band", Q Magazine, November 01, 2000)
There is one line that really irritates me on the album. It's in "New York," when you sing "I just bought a place in New York!" and I'm thinking 'typical fucking rock star!'
[Bono:] "I was gonna change the line to something less consumerist but why I left it in was... I had just got a place in New York! (Laughs) And it kinda made me smile. Even though the song is not autobiographical. OK, now you're thinking 'the bastard's got a nice place on Central Park' but the character of the song it could be a shoe box, you don't know! In fact, the song originally ended with a free-form conversation about Frank Sinatra and I had to take it out 'cause I think it became self conscious: now it was me talking and then the apartment suddenly got turned into a penthouse and it became a Bono song about mid-life crisis. But it's a true story. I was at dinner once with Frank and he took a blue paper napkin from the table, he was just staring at it, and he said, to no one in particular, 'I remember when my eyes were this blue'. He put it and kept it in an inside pocket. It was very cool."
(from "Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot Press, December 15, 2000)
MTVi News: "New York" has nods, it seems, to both Lou Reed and Frank Sinatra. How did that song come together?
Bono: There was a verse about Lou Reed, that didn't make it, and a verse about Frank Sinatra (that also didn't make it). And Lou has an album called New York, and he mentions my name on one of the tracks, "Beginning of a Great Adventure." And I just think he is to New York what James Joyce was to Dublin. And I just couldn't help -- I just did a little impersonation of him in the first verse, and I hope it'll make him smile. But when I saw him a few weeks ago, I didn't tell him. A lot of the lyrics were written on the spot over two takes, and then I went away and kind of, collaged it up based on my experience in the summer in New York last year. It's not autobiography, but it is based on -- I was there when it was 104 degrees, and I watched some people do their very best to destroy their peaceful lives.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
Amazon.co.uk: In the song "New York" on All That You Can't Leave Behind, you sing about having a mid-life crisis. People would assume that it's autobiographical...
Bono: They would. I've realised that. There used to be a verse at the end about Frank Sinatra, because if I was going to be singing about New York, New York, I felt like I should. It went "When I'm down on my luck / I sometimes think of Frank Sinatra / I met him once / He was more than generous / At dinner one evening he found a blue paper napkin ... and he stared at it and said to no one in particular, I remember when my eyes were this blue." Which is how the song ended. And it's a true story, though what actually happened was that after he'd said it, he carefully folded it up and put it in his pocket so he could look at it again later. It was this moment of melancholy that I'll never forget. But I took out that scene because I didn't want people to think the song was autobiographical -- you know, I did that song with him and everything (on Duets Vol. 1). If I had a mid-life crisis, it was when I was 27. I have electrical storms of a different kind now. The character I was writing about was someone who'd come to New York to burn himself out, to lose himself, and that's not me.
(from an interview at Amazon UK)
YouTube - U2 Grace
Divine grace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Christianity, divine grace refers to the sovereign favour of God for humankind — especially in regard to salvation — irrespective of actions ("deeds"), earned worth, or proven goodness.
Grace is enabling power sufficient for progression. Grace divine is an indispensable gift from God for development, improvement, and character expansion. Without God's grace, there are certain limitations, weaknesses, flaws, impurities, and faults (i.e. carnality) humankind cannot overcome. Therefore, it is necessary to increase in God's grace for added perfection, completeness, and flawlessness.
More broadly, divine grace refers to God's gifts to humankind, including life, creation, and salvation. More narrowly but more commonly, grace describes the means by which humans are granted salvation (and to some, saved from original sin). Grace is of central importance in the theology of Christianity, as well as one of the most contentious issues in Christian sectarianism.
Grace is often distinguished from mercy in that mercy is seen as not receiving punishment that one deserves to receive, whereas grace is receiving a positive benefit that one does not deserve to receive. Divine Grace also can be defined as God's empowering presence in ones life enabling them to do and be what they were created to do and be.
YouTube - U2 - TFI Friday - "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" (2 of 2)
U2 say it's unlikely the song they've written with Salman Rushdie will come out as a single. "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is the name of the track and is also the title of Rushdie's latest novel. However, there are plans to make it available on the Internet.
"I said to Bono and the band's manager, Paul McGuinness, copies of the novel when it was finished are in manuscript", Salman Rushdie told Radio One. "And, to my delight, Bono rang up some weeks later and said he'd written a melody, which he thought was one of the most beautiful melodies he'd ever come up with". And Salman says he agrees: "A few weeks after that I heard it and I think it's a lovely song. It's a sad love song. It's a ballad. In the novel it's a song that almost the hero writes just after the earthquake in which his wife is killed". Salman says the earthquake actually opens the novel: "So it's a kind of lament for his lost love. So I always knew, you know, that it wasn't going to be an uptempo foot-tapper, because it's a sad song. I think it sounds like, I hope, one of those big U2 ballads for which Bono's voice, actually, is beautifully well suited".
(from BBC, April 1998)
YouTube - Summer Rain U2
YouTube - Always - U2
YouTube - Big Girls Are Best - U2
YouTube - U2 - Don't Take Your Guns to Town (Hanover Studios)
YouTube - U2 - I Remember You (Live)
YouTube - Michael Hutchence feat Bono - "Slideaway"
[...] Lyrically, Bono says the song is about "a person who loses everything and has never been happier. It's a song about taking stock of the important things in life."
(from "Track By Track -- U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind" by Larry Flick, Billboard magazine, September 29, 2000)
BONO: [...] Actually, there's kind of a space theme to this album.
A space theme?
BONO: Making this record it was coming up to the millennium and they were kind of replaying the whole century on TV. They were showing shots of the Apollo moon landing one night and, I'm sure this goes for a lot of people, but they're the ones when I was a child that really showed me the size of the Earth -- how tiny it was and how big the universe was and how full of possibilities and danger and potential -- you know, all of these things. And there's a little bit of it on a lot of songs on the album. It just kind of bleeds in.
Where exactly?
BONO: Like in the middle of "Beautiful Day" -- in this song about a guy who loses everything but has never felt better -- you have this hard cut to all the stuff the astronauts spotted from orbit. The Bedouin fires, the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon, all those things. And I do like that idea of going from the domestic to the... extra-terrestrial.
(from "The Final Frontier" by Olaf Tyaransen, Hot Press, October 26, 2000)
All That You Can't Leave Behind closes the cycle in a rush of clean arrangements and heady choruses. And it works: "Beautiful Day," the band's first single in two years, topped the Australian charts in a single bound two weeks ago, as it did elsewhere.
The makeover is not purely cosmetic. The song's opening lines, "The heart is a bloom / Shoots up through the stony ground," is a reaffirmation of hope against great odds, a classic U2 theme if ever there was one. Bono agrees it strikes a kind of keynote to the whole experience.
"I think sometimes if you lose everything, it's as good a place to start as any," he says. "That's kinda what the song's about. I know somebody who lost pretty much everything: had a terminal illness, gave up their job, everything, 'cause they wanted to smell the flowers while they can, and they just had the best time ever.
"It turned out they were wrongly diagnosed, but they never went back. You know, sometimes the moment when the house is falling down around your ears and your friends have all deserted you is actually when you get started."
(from "Rock Of Age Is Harder To Do" by Michael Dwyer, The Age, October 27, 2000)
MTVi News: How did "Beautiful Day" come together, and why was that the right one to start with, as a single and on the album?
Bono: It's optimistic. It's just an up idea, that you can lose everything, and somehow find yourself, you know. And, you know, you can lose your girlfriend, your house; everything's going wrong. And the character in the song is just, he never felt better (laughs). And, it's a little haiku perhaps, or Zen, but it's just a great idea, and you know, optimistic. To write music that's up, that isn't schlock, is quite hard. It's much easier to paint with black.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
YouTube - U2 Stuck In A Moment(...) ACOUSTIC -GREAT AND RARE!
One of the finest songs on All That You Can't Leave Behind is called "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," and it is an argument between someone committing suicide and his angry friend. In public, Bono has been edging around the song, but at Irving Plaza, for the first time, he introduces it quite plainly: "This is a song about friendship," he says. "It's for a good friend… Michael Hutchence."
"I don't know why I felt uncomfortable to do that," he tells me. "I just wanted to do that." (Hutchence died of asphyxiation in an Australian hotel room in Sydney in 1997. His death was ruled a suicide, though his partner, Paula Yates, who herself died of an overdose last September, argued he lost his life in a solitary sex game that went wrong.)
Bono talks about the times he and Hutchence spent together in the two years after 1993's Zooropa tour. For much of that time, Bono and the Edge lived in a house in France: "A couple of years of pure joy, just listening to music, and people came from far and wide to stay. I grew a beard, put on a few pounds and drank a lot of whiskey, and it was the most extraordinary life, just one of those stupid times when you fall in love with music and everything." (It was the spirit of that long party they originally intended to capture on their last album, Pop, but characteristically, the mission altered: "It's like a party for two songs, and then it's the hangover.")
Some nights they would be sitting outside, having a drink at one in the morning, and Hutchence would just appear. He'd climb in over the gates. And they'd go out. One night they ended up sleeping on the beach.
"The first verse, it's really very defensive," he says. (It begins, "I'm not afraid of anything in this world / There's nothing you can throw at me that I haven't already heard.") "I think other people who have lost a mate to suicide will all tell you the same thing -- just the overpowering guilt that you weren't there for that person. As anyone around here will tell you, friendship is a thing that I hold very sacred. Cocteau, I think he only wrote one serious essay in his life, and it was on the subject of friendship -- friendship is higher than love. He goes on about how it's less glamorous, less passionate, less everything, but perhaps endures and comes from as deep a place. So it really threw me. Can you really be that busy that you don't notice your mate on the slide, as it were? I am the most loyal, and the most unreliable, friend. It's the way I am -- I forget phone numbers… I don't use the phone for fun now… So I just remember feeling this overpowering sense of guilt. And then anger. And annoyance. That song is an argument. It's a row between mates. You're kind of trying to slap somebody around the face, trying to wake them up out of an idea. In my case it's a row. Although, oddly enough, we discussed suicide a few times. And we both agreed how pathetic it was."
[...]
You're confident that it was suicide?
Pause. "You know, I'd love to think that he went out on some spectacular sexual maneuver, but knowing the state of him at that time, I don't think so. But I'm sure of this: If he had lasted half an hour longer, he would be alive now. He couldn't see past, he couldn't see out that half an hour. And apparently that's what people do… and a friend of his told me that he'd brought up our conversation a few days before that."
[...]
How did the argument in the song form in your head?
"Being right there. Just wanting to be in that half hour. So in the song, I'm right there -- it's like, just wanting to be in that half an hour. I wanted to have that argument in that half an hour. But I didn't put down that it was about Michael Hutchence because, for me, songs, I never make things specific to anything. And I didn't feel comfortable saying it while Paula was alive, because I knew it was important to her that he didn't commit suicide. But he did, and we have to say that. And I know the people that he called that night, and I know." By now, Bono's eyes are as you know they must be. "I felt the biggest respect I could pay him was not to write some stupid soppy fucking song, so I wrote a really tough, nasty little number. Sort of, you know, slapping him around the head. And I'm sorry, but that's how it came out for me."
So it just basically says: If you stay stuck in this suicidal moment, you're an idiot?
"Just, come on, you know. Come on."
(from "Comeback of the year" by Chris Heath, Rolling Stone, May 2000)
There's a quality of philosophical acceptance of mortality, though. There is no fear of death in the lyrics.
[Bono:] "No, there's not. It feels fearless to me, the album. The opening line of 'Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of' is 'I'm not afraid of anything in this world'. A pop song starts with that, you have to back it up. That was written for a friend of mine who committed suicide, and it's an argument with him. But it's sort of a declaration of your own position: it's got that attitude of, you know, when your jaw sticks out, like you do before a row. It's like somebody's in a stupor and you're trying to wake them up, 'cause the cops are coming, and they're sitting at the wheel and you're trying to get them out of the car cause they're gonna crash it. I wondered why the first verse was so first person? Why was it about me when I was writing a song about a mate? And I realised it was a defence because I felt so guilty. The original opening line was 'I'm not afraid of anything in this world / But when I see what it's done to you, then I'm scared'. Imagine making pop music out of all this! (Laughs). There's a thing!"
(from "Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot Press, December 15, 2000)
Amazon.co.uk: That said [Bono's comments on the allegedly autobiographical nature of "New York"], as the song stands you don't really go out of your way to distance yourself from the character.
Bono: That's true. I suppose Michael Hutchence (INXS frontman) left anyone who knew him with the feeling of... be very careful how close to the ledge you walk. If there's anyone being heckled on the record, it's probably myself. That's always the way with songwriters, really -- you preach what you need to hear yourself, so I'm sure that's finally what "Stuck in a Moment," for example, is about.
(from an interview at Amazon UK)
YouTube - U2 - Elevation {Live In Milan Italy}
YouTube - U2 - Walk On @ 2002 Grammy Awards
We are talking about the song "Walk On," the one that provides the album's title. It is dedicated to (and loosely refers to) the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who stayed to oppose the totalitarian regime in Burma rather than be with her husband and son. Bono pauses for a long time, trying to work out how to explain something. "If you've ever had a fright in your life, someone close to you dies, or whatever," he begins, "things come into sharp focus and you just… suddenly some people become more important to you than others. Some ideas become more important to you than others. I think the Dalai Lama says, 'Begin with death, start from there, and you won't go far wrong.'" Bono chuckles. "I don't think he was just having a bad day. Christ says, I think, in the Sermon on the Mount, 'If you love your life too much, you've already lost it.' Which is an interesting one. As a younger man I remember I didn't understand what that meant, because I loved life. You're holding on so tight to it you're incapable of doing anything with it. It's about fear."
But, I put to him, the phrase "all that you can't leave behind" is talking about death, isn't it?
"Yeah." He tries to explain the reasons why he no longer feels the reckless immortality he assumed when he was twenty, and alludes to a recent private crisis he'd rather not specify. "It's hard for me to talk about in particular. I think I'd rather just say I had a bit of a fright, a shock of some kind, and leave it at that. But it wasn't really just people close to me being sick or Michael Hutchence dying…" Then he adds, "I think Michael Hutchence's death really threw me, and my father got sick, and it was just one of those years. Everything came into sharp focus for me. There's a lot of genuine love of life on that record."
Despite that spirit, I can't think of a record besides Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind more concerned with mortality…
"Right. And he had a fright."
(from "Comeback of the year" by Chris Heath, Rolling Stone, May 2000)
MTVi News: "Walk On" is another track that really seemed central to the album. You took the album title from the lyrics...
Bono: It was inspired by a Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her struggle for free elections in Burma. She left her comfort of her home in Oxford, as an academic, and her family and her son and her husband, and went to do the right thing for her people. And it was just one of the great acts of courage in the 20th century. And it's continuing into the 21st century, and her life is -- she's been under house arrest for some time now, and people get, you know, we all get very worried about how she's doing. At first, I was writing it from the point of view of her family, or her son, you know, her husband, and then in the end I kept it a little abstract and just let it be a love song about somebody having to leave a relationship for the right reasons.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
YouTube - U2 Kite live from Sydney November 13th 2006 Telstra Stadium
MTVi News: On "Kite," you sing of being "the last of the rock stars when hip-hop drove the big cars / in the time when new media / was the big idea." How close does that come to summing up your feelings about being in a big rock band in this age of hip-hop and rap-rock and teen pop?
Bono: I just kinda wanted to put a date on it. Like the way you might in a diary. And it was also some bait for rock critics who might get annoyed. I always feel it's one of our jobs in U2, as well as kind of singing your life, is just occasionally to annoy people. (Laughs) What do you mean "the last of the rock stars"? I could see a lot of people were gonna get cross with that one.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
"It's a reference," he [Bono] explains, "to an absurd moment of parenting, where I took a kite up on Killiney Hill with Jordan and Eve -- I'd been away, and wanted to do the dad thing. It was very Tommy Cooper -- the kite blew off the line and smashed to smithereens on the first flight, and Evie just asked if they could go home and play with their tamagotchis. So the song is about realising you have to let go of them at some point. Songwriting is still a surprise, because you often think you're describing one thing, and it just turns on its head. Suddenly I was back in a caravan site when I was a kid, and I realised that he had tried to do exactly the same thing with a kite, and it had gone equally badly. I realised I wasn't singing from quite as theoretical a place as I thought."
(from "Pro Bono" by Andrew Mueller, The Weekend Australian, December 01, 2001)
Did you bring "Kite" to his [Bono's father] attention or was he aware of it?
[Bono:] No. There's an odd one. I have this verse about taking the kids up on Killiney Hill with a kite. Then I realised, I went back in my head, and I remembered being in Rush or Skerries, one incident where exactly the same thing happened. We used to have a caravan, and I sort of felt the goodbye aspect of the song was not from me to him, but from him to me. That's the thing about songwriting -- you're the last to know what you're on about.
(from "Matter Of Life And Death" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press Annual 2002, December 01, 2001)
Chris Evans: "In a time of new media, that was the big idea" -- is written on this album. Obviously you now think that's not the big idea anymore.
Bono: Nope, that's the song "Kite" you're talking about there, that's a way of dating it. It's a very emotional song, "Kite," it's about letting go of somebody you love, we all have to do that, you know, whether it's a family or lovers or whatever, and I just wanted to put a date on it, it's no big comment.
(from Chris Evans Breakfast Show)
YouTube - U2 - In A Little While (Anaheim 2001)
The song came out of a jam with the band during the All That You Can't Leave Behind sessions. Bono has noted that his voice was in terrible shape at the time of the recording of this song. The lyrics refer to a hangover, in the vein of their Achtung Baby track "Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World," which describes a person trying to get home drunk. However, Bono has noted in live performances that it became a gospel song after he heard that Joey Ramone, the iconic front man of the legendary punk band, The Ramones, listened to this song as his final one on his deathbed.
YouTube - U2 - Wild Honey (Elevation East Rutherford)
YouTube - Peace on Earth
Inside the hotel, he [Bono] sits at a table in the back of the closed restaurant and talks about the 1998 terrorist bombing in Northern Ireland that led him to write the angry "Peace on Earth."
"The bombing in Omagh traumatized the whole country," he says of the incident, which killed more than two dozen people including many children. "People were weeping openly on the street. They read all the names on the radio at 6 p.m. and all traffic stopped.
"There was a real stink in the air that Christmas in Dublin and Belfast. Children's choirs were on the pavement singing about peace on Earth, but it sounded out of tune."
(from "Far Down the Road, a Sudden U-Turn" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2000)
Time and again, he [Bono] comes across the accepted philosophy that the world is ruined, that there is no hope, that the System will always win and justice is a lie.
"That's the context that 'Peace on Earth' was written in," he says, plainly, of the album's most shockingly cynical song. "It was written from exactly that place. Literally on the day of the Omagh bomb. And the despair. And not just the lives that had been destroyed but the peace process and all these things... it was a joke. And then following through at Christmas, children singing 'Peace on earth, goodwill to all mankind' and you just think, 'Shut the f--k up.' Y'know? That's how people felt. I know Ali did. I didn't, and I don't know why, but I wrote their song. That thing of 'How could you talk about that? F--k off.' But I think the brave ones are the ones that drown it out, with a bigger noise, with a bigger idea. I don't think they're often stars. They're often mothers, firemen, working people who get on with their lives."
(from "Pop Smart" by Sylvia Patterson, Sunday Herald, November 05, 2000)
[Bono:] "'Peace On Earth' is so heavy. Just calling a song 'Peace on Earth' is like mud pie, right? You just wanna know where that guy parks his car (laughs). I'd wanna give somebody a slap for that! So it has to be a great song. It's a very bitter pill to swallow and it was written literally on the day the Omagh bomb went off, right then. Nobody could actually believe it. In Ireland, on the six o'clock news, when they read out the names of all the people who died the city came to a complete standstill. People were just weeping... in cars, on O'Connell Street, all over the place. It was really a trauma for most people. Because not only was it the destruction of the lives it was a destruction of the peace process, which had been put together with sticky tape and glue and tacks and a lot of faith. It seemed it was destroyed. It would be hard to describe to people who were not Irish what that felt like that day. It was certainly the lowest day in my life, outside of personal losses. I couldn't believe it, that people could do that. At that time. That Christmas, the whole 'peace on earth, goodwill to all men' struck a sour note. It was very hard to be a believer that Christmas. In the song, they are real names of victims of the bomb... but I also tried to bring it back to Cedarwood Road and growing up and my own violence, remembering all of that. There's a vanity in there: 'they say what you mock will overtake you / and you become a monster so the monster won't break you'. I put in a couple of my own aphorisms as if they are out there! (laughs) It's a terrible cheat as a writer but I'd love to get one of them off, you know? 'Oh yeah, they do say that, don't they?' No!"
(from "Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot Press, December 15, 2000)
Q: Does coming from Ireland, where there is a history of violence and terrorism, give you any added perspective on what has happened here [Sept. 11]?
A: [Bono:] There's a song on the album called "Peace on Earth" that talks about that, but I didn't want to do it in the show because there is such a bitterness to it. It vents a certain anger about how the killing just keeps going on. But someone at one of the shows held up this big banner that quoted one of the lines, "Their lives are bigger than any big idea," and I think that has struck a chord.
(from "Joy Makes a Return" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2001)
YouTube - U2 - when you look at the world
The song is about a person's faith being troubled by tragedy. It has been described by Bono as being told from "the point of view of someone who is having a crisis of faith looking at someone who has built their house upon the rock:.[1] "When I Look at the World" has also been described as being about the commitment of Ali Hewson towards Chernobyl and the victims of the tragedy.
YouTube - U2 New York live from the Irving Plaza 2000
Behind us, as we lounge on U2's waterside patio, the final mix of discursive travelogue "New York" wobbles out of a crap Sony boom box. With little Eve Hewson on his lap, Bono sings along...
"I hit an iceberg in my life / But here I am still afloat / Lose your balance, lose your wife / In the queue for the lifeboat / You've got to put the women and children first / But you've got an unquenchable thirst... for New York."
Like a few of Bono's characters on All That You Can't Leave Behind, the lyric outlines a man on a moral holiday, braving the temptations of escape and infidelity. Encouraging the theory that it's autobiographical is the fact that Bono has just bought an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
"It's important to describe your demons in order to deal with them," says Bono. "I have a side of me that wants to run really fast away from everything that you could call home and responsibilities. But I have another side, which is stronger, that draws me towards home and those very same responsibilities. When I'm at work I play out those things... but maybe if I hadn't found Ali and this community of people, then maybe I'm just lazy enough to have surrendered."
You kept in the bit about midlife crisis...
"I was seriously wondering whether to or not. Just looking at you when we played it to you in Dublin, I could see you writing the headline [laughs]. But it's just funnier, that line. From this character, it's believable."
Bono laughs, then frowns.
"It's not autobiography. It's quite the opposite in the sense that I'm coming out of a period: I have run off, I'm back now. I'm more at home... with myself. I had a bit of fright, basically, and the song 'Kite' comes out of that too. I hadn't been around for a while and was determined to do the proper Dad thing. I took the kids to Killiney Hill in Dublin county to fly a kite. Up it went and immediately down it came, and smashed to smithereens. The kids just looked at me: [affects unimpressed child look] 'Come on Dad, let's go and play some video games.' How cruel is that?"
(from "The Elastic Bono Band", Q Magazine, November 01, 2000)
There is one line that really irritates me on the album. It's in "New York," when you sing "I just bought a place in New York!" and I'm thinking 'typical fucking rock star!'
[Bono:] "I was gonna change the line to something less consumerist but why I left it in was... I had just got a place in New York! (Laughs) And it kinda made me smile. Even though the song is not autobiographical. OK, now you're thinking 'the bastard's got a nice place on Central Park' but the character of the song it could be a shoe box, you don't know! In fact, the song originally ended with a free-form conversation about Frank Sinatra and I had to take it out 'cause I think it became self conscious: now it was me talking and then the apartment suddenly got turned into a penthouse and it became a Bono song about mid-life crisis. But it's a true story. I was at dinner once with Frank and he took a blue paper napkin from the table, he was just staring at it, and he said, to no one in particular, 'I remember when my eyes were this blue'. He put it and kept it in an inside pocket. It was very cool."
(from "Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot Press, December 15, 2000)
MTVi News: "New York" has nods, it seems, to both Lou Reed and Frank Sinatra. How did that song come together?
Bono: There was a verse about Lou Reed, that didn't make it, and a verse about Frank Sinatra (that also didn't make it). And Lou has an album called New York, and he mentions my name on one of the tracks, "Beginning of a Great Adventure." And I just think he is to New York what James Joyce was to Dublin. And I just couldn't help -- I just did a little impersonation of him in the first verse, and I hope it'll make him smile. But when I saw him a few weeks ago, I didn't tell him. A lot of the lyrics were written on the spot over two takes, and then I went away and kind of, collaged it up based on my experience in the summer in New York last year. It's not autobiography, but it is based on -- I was there when it was 104 degrees, and I watched some people do their very best to destroy their peaceful lives.
(from "U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV, January 2001)
Amazon.co.uk: In the song "New York" on All That You Can't Leave Behind, you sing about having a mid-life crisis. People would assume that it's autobiographical...
Bono: They would. I've realised that. There used to be a verse at the end about Frank Sinatra, because if I was going to be singing about New York, New York, I felt like I should. It went "When I'm down on my luck / I sometimes think of Frank Sinatra / I met him once / He was more than generous / At dinner one evening he found a blue paper napkin ... and he stared at it and said to no one in particular, I remember when my eyes were this blue." Which is how the song ended. And it's a true story, though what actually happened was that after he'd said it, he carefully folded it up and put it in his pocket so he could look at it again later. It was this moment of melancholy that I'll never forget. But I took out that scene because I didn't want people to think the song was autobiographical -- you know, I did that song with him and everything (on Duets Vol. 1). If I had a mid-life crisis, it was when I was 27. I have electrical storms of a different kind now. The character I was writing about was someone who'd come to New York to burn himself out, to lose himself, and that's not me.
(from an interview at Amazon UK)
YouTube - U2 Grace
Divine grace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Christianity, divine grace refers to the sovereign favour of God for humankind — especially in regard to salvation — irrespective of actions ("deeds"), earned worth, or proven goodness.
Grace is enabling power sufficient for progression. Grace divine is an indispensable gift from God for development, improvement, and character expansion. Without God's grace, there are certain limitations, weaknesses, flaws, impurities, and faults (i.e. carnality) humankind cannot overcome. Therefore, it is necessary to increase in God's grace for added perfection, completeness, and flawlessness.
More broadly, divine grace refers to God's gifts to humankind, including life, creation, and salvation. More narrowly but more commonly, grace describes the means by which humans are granted salvation (and to some, saved from original sin). Grace is of central importance in the theology of Christianity, as well as one of the most contentious issues in Christian sectarianism.
Grace is often distinguished from mercy in that mercy is seen as not receiving punishment that one deserves to receive, whereas grace is receiving a positive benefit that one does not deserve to receive. Divine Grace also can be defined as God's empowering presence in ones life enabling them to do and be what they were created to do and be.
YouTube - U2 - TFI Friday - "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" (2 of 2)
U2 say it's unlikely the song they've written with Salman Rushdie will come out as a single. "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is the name of the track and is also the title of Rushdie's latest novel. However, there are plans to make it available on the Internet.
"I said to Bono and the band's manager, Paul McGuinness, copies of the novel when it was finished are in manuscript", Salman Rushdie told Radio One. "And, to my delight, Bono rang up some weeks later and said he'd written a melody, which he thought was one of the most beautiful melodies he'd ever come up with". And Salman says he agrees: "A few weeks after that I heard it and I think it's a lovely song. It's a sad love song. It's a ballad. In the novel it's a song that almost the hero writes just after the earthquake in which his wife is killed". Salman says the earthquake actually opens the novel: "So it's a kind of lament for his lost love. So I always knew, you know, that it wasn't going to be an uptempo foot-tapper, because it's a sad song. I think it sounds like, I hope, one of those big U2 ballads for which Bono's voice, actually, is beautifully well suited".
(from BBC, April 1998)
YouTube - Summer Rain U2
YouTube - Always - U2
YouTube - Big Girls Are Best - U2
YouTube - U2 - Don't Take Your Guns to Town (Hanover Studios)
YouTube - U2 - I Remember You (Live)
YouTube - Michael Hutchence feat Bono - "Slideaway"
This song had some parts added by Bono and relates to the subject in Stuck in a moment
Interpretations from:
Threesunrises.net -- U2 Song Meanings
and Wikipedia
Interpretations from:
Threesunrises.net -- U2 Song Meanings
and Wikipedia
Grace and Peace On Earth are truly dreadful songs...
