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from u2.com
Fresh territory for us...'
'The overall feeling of the record is of new ideas not heard on a U2 album before.' We caught up with Edge to talk about how the record is coming along.
Remember we talked with Edge about his work on the forthcoming movie documentary It Might Get Loud ? We also sneaked in a few questions about how the new U2 record is coming along. Here's what he told us.
On the subject of the guitar and your role in ‘It Might Get Loud’, during the writing for this new U2 record do you ever wonder if you sound too much like… yourself ?
"It’s not really a case of sounding like myself but that, if my guitar is the most distinctive musical element in the U2 sound, you just don’t want to present an album where there is too many familiar sounds. You want to present an album which is balanced between things people know and love and also things that people have never heard before.
So it’s not that we don’t want to refer to the past but we don’t want that to be what people think of when they hear the album – it should be just one of the elements. And we’re really happy with the innovations we’ve come up with on this record, I think it’s really fresh territory for us - a lot of people will be very surprised in a good way. "
Bono told us he thought the transition from the last record to this next one could be as distinctive as that from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby.
"It’s hard to draw direct parallels but I think it’s a movement to a different level. It’s a different place in terms of songwriting and recording, in terms of arrangements and use of instruments, and I think that looking back people will say, yes, this album was a big departure. "
When you’re deciding which songs might go on the album are you ever wondering if one track might be U2 in 2009 whereas another might be U2 in, say, 2004 ?
"Yes, and some things are shockingly different and some things actually sound more like the U2 that people have heard before. That’s OK, everything can’t be a total departure but I think the overall feeling of the record is of new ideas not heard on a U2 album before. And I think within the next few months we’ll get it finished so 2009 will be a busy year for us. "
That’ll be five years after the last record which some would say is a long time…
"With an album like this, where we’re really breaking new ground, we took the view that it was better to put more energy into writing and experimenting so we’ve amassed a lot of material, upwards of fifty songs … although not all have not been finished. At the same time Bono and I have been working on the Spiderman project, so it’s been a very fruitful period. There have been phases when we started to look at how to reproduce the material, and so we weren’t writing, but in the main we’ve been writing constantly and it’s been a great experience.
I think the fact that we said early on we don’t even want to think about where this material is going was giving ourselves a great freedom - just being able to make music for the sake of making music, to create without thinking what it was going to go towards. That’s kind of crucial because if you start to try and write songs with a particular ambition in mind, the work is never as interesting. You can get into that Tin Pan Alley mentality – and sometimes you do get great results from that – but if you’re really trying to break new ground you’ve got to go out there all the way and not be concerned about what the results will be like. So that’s where we went. "
With so many songs, presumably the album could still go in several different directions…
"Actually there are two or three albums of finished mixes that we could release tomorrow but we’re looking for a certain kind of arc to the entire collection of songs and so that’s why we’re keeping working until we’re 100% happy with that. For us it’s about artistic integrity, about making the album that we want to release. It’s only in the process of making an album that you start to understand what it is you have. So it was only recently we started to get a sense of the scope of what we had and having got to that point we asked ourselves if it had reached its potential or if it could go further… and we concluded it could! It’s an amazing piece of work and it needs further development."
Fresh territory for us...'
'The overall feeling of the record is of new ideas not heard on a U2 album before.' We caught up with Edge to talk about how the record is coming along.
Remember we talked with Edge about his work on the forthcoming movie documentary It Might Get Loud ? We also sneaked in a few questions about how the new U2 record is coming along. Here's what he told us.
On the subject of the guitar and your role in ‘It Might Get Loud’, during the writing for this new U2 record do you ever wonder if you sound too much like… yourself ?
"It’s not really a case of sounding like myself but that, if my guitar is the most distinctive musical element in the U2 sound, you just don’t want to present an album where there is too many familiar sounds. You want to present an album which is balanced between things people know and love and also things that people have never heard before.
So it’s not that we don’t want to refer to the past but we don’t want that to be what people think of when they hear the album – it should be just one of the elements. And we’re really happy with the innovations we’ve come up with on this record, I think it’s really fresh territory for us - a lot of people will be very surprised in a good way. "
Bono told us he thought the transition from the last record to this next one could be as distinctive as that from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby.
"It’s hard to draw direct parallels but I think it’s a movement to a different level. It’s a different place in terms of songwriting and recording, in terms of arrangements and use of instruments, and I think that looking back people will say, yes, this album was a big departure. "
When you’re deciding which songs might go on the album are you ever wondering if one track might be U2 in 2009 whereas another might be U2 in, say, 2004 ?
"Yes, and some things are shockingly different and some things actually sound more like the U2 that people have heard before. That’s OK, everything can’t be a total departure but I think the overall feeling of the record is of new ideas not heard on a U2 album before. And I think within the next few months we’ll get it finished so 2009 will be a busy year for us. "
That’ll be five years after the last record which some would say is a long time…
"With an album like this, where we’re really breaking new ground, we took the view that it was better to put more energy into writing and experimenting so we’ve amassed a lot of material, upwards of fifty songs … although not all have not been finished. At the same time Bono and I have been working on the Spiderman project, so it’s been a very fruitful period. There have been phases when we started to look at how to reproduce the material, and so we weren’t writing, but in the main we’ve been writing constantly and it’s been a great experience.
I think the fact that we said early on we don’t even want to think about where this material is going was giving ourselves a great freedom - just being able to make music for the sake of making music, to create without thinking what it was going to go towards. That’s kind of crucial because if you start to try and write songs with a particular ambition in mind, the work is never as interesting. You can get into that Tin Pan Alley mentality – and sometimes you do get great results from that – but if you’re really trying to break new ground you’ve got to go out there all the way and not be concerned about what the results will be like. So that’s where we went. "
With so many songs, presumably the album could still go in several different directions…
"Actually there are two or three albums of finished mixes that we could release tomorrow but we’re looking for a certain kind of arc to the entire collection of songs and so that’s why we’re keeping working until we’re 100% happy with that. For us it’s about artistic integrity, about making the album that we want to release. It’s only in the process of making an album that you start to understand what it is you have. So it was only recently we started to get a sense of the scope of what we had and having got to that point we asked ourselves if it had reached its potential or if it could go further… and we concluded it could! It’s an amazing piece of work and it needs further development."
Edge's take on the situation would have made me feel better about the delay.
