Where the Streets Have No Name has for a very long time been my favourite song of all time, and it always will be, but it's kind of like a #0 favourite. Like, there's Streets, and then the list starts.
So for me it's Running to Stand Still. I still remember the exact circumstances of when I listened to The Joshua Tree for the first time - it was the afternoon of my dad's 50th. I'd heard the first three tracks a ton of times before, so after loving Bullet, Running to Stand Still was the first time I had a really visceral reaction to a track on the album.
I could spend 10,000 words talking about it.
The acoustic guitar at the start foretells your heart ripping four minutes later. That soft, contemplative piano and Edge's chipped guitar. Bono's vocals; when they came from nowhere else but the depths of his heart, not from endless focus group workshopping or with a goal to hit the top of the charts in mind.
Ha la la la de day.........
The story is a fucking tragedy, through and through. I'll never do heroin, and this song, like Bad, is of course about how society created a monster scourge. But maybe my absolute favourite thing about Running to Stand Still is that it is completely neutral. This is a place of non-judgement. And the outro captures that perfectly: Running to Stand Still is U2 painting a very unflattering picture of drug abuse in Dublin. But it doesn't demean those who fell under its spell.
Bono summed it up perfectly: "If you can't change the world you're living in, seeing through different eyes is the only alternative. And heroin gives you heroin eyes to see the world with."
That's the Bono and U2 that I love. Empathy. Heroin is awful, but, if it's the only way you can be happy, then fuck it, go for it. And that's how I've felt with a lot of my anxiety and my coping mechanisms as well.
I can barely get through the song without breaking down. To see it live earlier this year, when I pretty much flew from Melbourne to LA solely for this one song, was beyond words.
Now Bono's harmonica, the piano, take me away......