Pretty much everything off Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree, and Rattle and Hum. These are, what I refer to, as "Bono, the brooding poet years". His imagination was lost in its own juices at this time. His writing really took off.
Some favourite lines that stick out for me:
* A Sort Of Homecoming ("And your earth moves beneath your own dream-landscape"; and "...this bomb-blast lightening waltz")
* Promenade (no one line sticks out, that's how good it is)
* Bad ("Bruised silken sky and burning flag / colours crash, collide in bloodshot eyes")
* Heartland ("See the sunrise over her skin / Dawn changes everything, everything"; and "Freeway like a river cuts through this land / Into the side of love...")
* All I Want Is You ("...a harbour in the Tempest")
* When Love Comes To Town ("...I through the dice when they pierced his side / but I've seen love conquer the Great Divide")
* One Tree Hill ("We see the sun go down, in your eyes")
* Mothers of the Disappeared ("See their tears in the rain fall")
* Running To Stand Still ("with her eyes painted red...")
* Hawkmoon 269 ("Like a Phoenix rising needs a holy tree...")
* Angel of Harlem ("An angel in Devil's shoes / Salvation in the blues...")
* Love Rescue Me ("See the purple of her eyes / The scarlet of my lies...")
* Bullet The Blue Sky ("His face red like a rose on a thorn bush / Like all the colours of a royal flush")
* Acrobat ("To take the cup / To fill it up / To drink it slow / I can't let you go"; and "In dreams begin responsibilites")
* One ("You say, Love is a temple / Love a higher law / Love is a temple / Love the higher law / You ask me to enter / But then you make me crawl") -- incidentally, I believe 'One' is Bono's finest hour as a songwriter, and even poetically it ranks right up there.
* Stay ("And if you look, you look through me / And when you talk you talk at me / And when I touch you, you don't feel a thing"; and also "...A vampire or a victim / It depends on whose around")
* Zooropa ("Let uncertainty be the guiding light")
* Gone ("What you thought was freedom is just greed")
* Please ("September, streets capsizing, spilling over down the drain / Shards of glass, splinters like rain / But you could only feel your own pain")
* Kite ("Somewhere I can taste the salt of the sea / There's a kite blowing out of control on the breeze / Sometimes I wonder what's going to happen to you / Sometimes you wonder what has happened to me")
* Walk On ("You could have flown away / A singing bird in an open cage / Who will only fly, only fly / For freedom...")
* Wild Honey ("I send you flowers / Cut flowers for you hall / I know your garden is full / But is there sweetness at all...")
* North And South Of The River ("There was a badness that had its way / But love wasn't lost / Love will have its day"; and "I want to meet you where you are / I don't need you to surrender")
* Never Let Me Go ("You take a stranger by the hand / A man who doesn't understand / His wildest dreams / You walk across the dirty sand / And offer him an ocean / Of what he's never seen")
* Falling At Your Feet (pretty much every word; every line needs the whole, and the whole needs every line -- kind of like Promenade and Bad that way)
Okay, that about wraps things up for now!
One thing I've noticed about what I like from early U2 opposed to later U2 (or maybe it's just Bono's style has changed) is the early stuff I appreciate more for its
poeticness, whereas the later work I appreciate more for, what I like to call, the
"U2 truisms" -- by that I mean, the later stuff is more declaritive, more direct, and not as flowery. I love the two lyrical eras for entirely different reasons. I'm a sucker for metaphor and imagery, so I do love to get lost in the poetry of the 80s stuff, but I am also deeply moved by the strong (but not preachy) sentiments of the 90s. It is a mark of a great songwriter to be direct and honest, without making the listener feel bombarded by the writer's views. Bono has recently accomplished this, much like Lennon once did, in my opinion.
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The Tempest
[This message has been edited by Michael Griffiths (edited 01-20-2002).]
