Wow, so interesting...
So, they got rid of the walking man thingie for Euro-shows, and have just this pulse-y thing happening then?
I just lost my mother, she'd been in this nether-world lying in a hospital bed for months when I'd first heard Sometimes, and I knew it would be emotional to see it performed live...surely was!
I'd cried a good number of times listening to it in the car, and cried at the show no surprise.
I liked the staging with the walking man and Bono's stance/movements while singing it. I think it would be even more emotional with this added pulse and flat-line thing for me actually, evocative of that experience.
To watch this parent sick for so long, trying to relate to them through a haze of rocky relationship (my relationship with my mom was too--one of the last things I said to her before the surgery to fix her heart didn't quite do the trick was 'you gotta make it through this because we have some more fighting to do!') as their life ticks away. It's a bit of a surreal period, especially if just then you're trying to achieve what you hadn't managed to with them all the years before, some sort of understanding, some sort of forgiveness, some approximation of a state of grace as those last heartbeats register on the machines. And it's not like the old feelings of resentment or wishing that the parent would be different go away at that place, at least for me they didn't, even as you try to move beyond them. Then for me at least there were these discordant extra bits of guilt, regret to go with the sympathy, desire to see things be better. I haven't really read much of the stuff bono has said about his relationship with his father, but for me, one of the things I'd bristle against most was any comparison of me to my mother. I just love Sometimes--it is to me the sound of someone trying to achieve a hardwon peace in that so-complicated relationship at that so-charged time. I wasn't with my mom when she died, and I would have liked to have been actually, so if they keep the flatline and pulse in for the fall leg shows I think I'll cry more...
cheers all...
and wait, really??!! Lemon is about bono's mum?!