what was your first reaction when you heard Zoo Station or Beautiful Day

[kingofsorrow]

zoo station: holy crap my cd player exploded.

beautiful day: "jesus? is that you?"

 

[SpaceBoy]

Hearing Zoo Station for the first time was like a musical awakening for me. Best opening track I've ever heard. Somehow I just new I was listening to my new favorite album right then and there. To this day I still consider Achtung Baby a work of sheer, unmatched genius. Beautiful Day was fantastic too because it was the first song released publicly from the first new U2 album since I had become a harcore fan. Man, what an exciting time that was.

 

[ShellBeThere]

I remember all those years ago now putting on Achtung Baby and hearing Zoo Station and feeling ohmygod what the hell is this sound?! It's so ...weird! But I liked it immediately too... the effect was very trippy, I recall distinctly, like mind-altering for me who didn't listen to music at the fringe and for whom this really was very "different" sounding for the time.

Zoo Station also felt to me very much like Bono calling from some other place he'd gone to, aesthetically, artistically, physically too...it really did feel like he was calling in on some new device Edge made from maybe that newly freed Berlin.
It totally worked, it was perfect.

Beautiful Day, which I didn't really hear until a long time after the rest of the world did, had a similar effect on me at first listen, in that it also felt like a big statement of place and purpose. But now it was a different world, bigger and more intimate at once. Bittersweet and reaching out, vulnerable but resilient. Where Zoo Station felt like slick patent leather kicking at the subway doors, Beautiful Day felt like roughed up buck walking along and finding that bloom in the stony ground and finding hope in that sight. Hit me in the shoulders heading upward, while Zoo Station hit around the waist and heading downward.
So, it wasn't getting 'wowed' by the sound or difference in feel with BD compared to ZS, but I thought BD was very beautiful and reflective of a new 'theme' as it were for U2. It somehow felt like a new direction was conveyed very subtly, almost subconsciously. Lovely on its own, and then listening to the rest of ATYCLB and seeing/hearing the whole vibe of the elevation tour, very perfect introduction to it all.

cheers all...

edit: or, to put it much more succinctly, kinda what kingofsorrow said above lol!

 

[nathan1977]

I wasn't a huge U2 fan before ZS, and I'd already heard The Fly and Mysterious Ways on the radio, so I knew that this album was something of a departure for them already. But then I bought the CD (on Thayer Street in Providence in November on a Friday night), came home late that night and put it on. I had my headphones on and wondered why I wasn't really hearing anything, so I turned the volume up, and when that slashing guitar came down, it was like my whole world changed.

BD on the other hand was simply accompanied by the blissful fact that my favorite band was back singing songs I could sing along too again.

 

[MrBrau1]

Zoo Station was 2 weeks before AB was released, lets say 11/5/91. WPDH in Poughkeepsie NY played the entire album before release and several of us sat in dorm room, smoked giant spliff, and listened with verve. Shocked and excited would be the only words. The first U2 in 3 years, and it sounded jagged and obtuse. Not really U2, until the soaring chorus. We had no repeat, as we were listening/taping off the radio and immediatly had EBTTRT in our heads.

Beautiful Day was 9/1/00. Cleaning our summer commune. Again, off the radio, what was WDRE in NY played it, and I captured it on my MD player. My entire ride back from Hampton Bays to the Bronx was that song. Over, and over, and over. Loved it. Big chorus, and guitars, guitars, guitars. The tune was a complete breath of fresh air on the radio at that time.

 

[coolian2]

Hadn't knowingly heard U2 before Beautiful Day.

When i first heard it i freaked out and just fucken had to have the track.

 

[silvrlvr]

You're all going to mock me but I had never heard Zoo Station all the way through until the BA concert last winter, which I listened to on that fits-and-starts live stream over the Web. I immediately went to look up the lyrics and read more about the song, of course feeling like an idiot when I realized, "OMG, that's Zoo Station." Then when I heard it contained a shoutout to Edge's little people I just about wept.

Beautiful Day was more in my conciousness back when it came out -- my dad worked for the airlines so I thought the video was just amazing. (Yes, I knew they didn't actually stand on a runway with oriental carpets and flights going overhead, the European aviation authority would never allow it Having been to Paris many times the scenes in CDG resonated, and the ablum art is so evocative of all my travels. I loved it both as a rock song and as a piece of music, i.e. the rapid chord changes.

 

[redhotswami]

zoo station: holy crap my cd player exploded.

beautiful day: "jesus? is that you?"

couldn'tve said it better myself

i didn't hear zoo station as a single....i didn't hear it til i got the album. anyway i thought it was CRAZY! within the first 30 seconds, you know your socks are gonna be rocked off with this album.

as for beautiful day...the beginning is amazing. the heartbeat is whwat really pulls me into the song i think. i didn't know it was u2 at first!

 

[LMP]

zoo station: holy crap my cd player exploded.

beautiful day: "jesus? is that you?"

or as people down south call him: "Heyzoos"

Zoo Station blew me away, literally. I sat down with a pair of massive headphones to listen to Achtung Baby for the first time, and it was just the most mindblowing experience I ever had listening to a song.

It all changed when I listened to other records, but Achtung Baby and Zoo Station were my first.

Beautiful Day is the best pop song of the past 7 years, and that's no lie.

It could be the best pop song U2's ever written. Nope, it is.

 

[Pero]

zoo station - pppppppppprrrrrrrrrrrrrm pmpm