Quoting from the previous thread:
I've never actually heard any indictation that it was written for Johnny Cash. Have you read Bill Flanagan's book U2 at the End of the World? It was written during the ZooTV tour, and goes into a lot of detail about the Zooropa sessions. The talk quite a bit about The Wanderer, and really, I think it fits perfectly with the Achtung Baby-Zooropa arc. In those songs you have this character who's dove headfirst into the gritty nightlife. The story is more prevelant on Achtung Baby than on Zooropa, but it's still there in some of the songs, especially The Wanderer.
If you look at the lyrics in the context of Bono on the ZooTV tour, it fits him perfectly. Comparing JT Bono to ZooTV Bono is like comparing night and day. On the surface it looked like he'd lost his faith and lost his mind, selling his soul to the devil and selling out to the rock world. But we all know that that's all it was: surface. The Wanderer is the story of that, this man on a journey to find himself among the dirty, gritty parts of the world, leaving his wife and family behind to do so. The song sort of becomes a confession, an apology, and as is mentioned in the book, because of that, it felt wrong to have Bono sing it on the album. Having Bono sing it would sort of break the fourth wall, it would admit that the whole "The Fly" rockstar ZooTV thing was a big con, deep down Bono was still the preachy Messianic figure we all came to know and love (and in some cases, despise) during the late 80s.
According to the book, Bono recorded the song, then Johnny Cash recorded the song, and among the U2 camp, there were some arguments about which version to use. Bono wanted to use Johnny Cash's. Eno and Flood thought doing so would disrupt the album, and wanted Bono's version to be used. Clearly Bono won that argument, and so Bono's confession got buried a little bit by using The Man in Black as the messenger.
