[...] The impish corrosion of songs like "Zoo Station" and "The Fly" is boldly undercut by darker musings such as "Love Is Blindness" and "One," Bono's disenchanted take on the nouveau hippie revival: "'One, man, one world, one love.' I liked the idea of taking that and saying, 'One man, but not the same.'"
(from "U2 Finds What It's Looking For" by David Fricke, Rolling Stone, October 01, 1992)
Before reacting with the Edge to my list of the 10 best U2 moments on record, Bono had a question of his own.
"Is it true that 'One' was played over the radio a lot during the Los Angeles riots?" the singer asked, referring to the most acclaimed song from the Achtung Baby album, and one of the songs on the list.
"That's what I heard from some friends," he added, "which is surprising because I never saw the song as something hopeful or comforting. To me, it was a very bitter song."
[...]
Edge: It was a very pivotal song in the recording of the album -- the first sort of breakthrough in what was an extremely difficult set of sessions in Berlin. I like the lyric a lot because it treads a very fine line between becoming too clear, too jingoistic, but in the end it never does... stays personal.
Bono: We spoke about this before. It is a song about coming together, but it's not the old hippie idea of "Let's all live together." It is, in fact, the opposite. It's saying, "We are one, but we're not the same." It's not saying we even want to get along, but that we have to get along together in this world if it is to survive. It's a reminder that we have no choice.
(from "U2's Pride (In The Name Of Songs); Achtung, Babies: Bono And Edge Evaluate One Critic's Choices For The Group's 10 Best Recordings, From 'I Will Follow' To 'One'" by Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993)
Recorded in Hansa Studios, formerly a Nazi mess hall, the song came from nowhere. Bono had a couple of middle-eights that fitted together, and it was while fiddling around with these mongrel tunes that the inordinately emotive lyrics of "One" began to seep through. "They just fell out of the sky," says Bono. "A gift from above."
This much he knows: the Dalai Lama had asked U2 to participate in a festival called "Oneness." Having sensed the unsavoury whiff of hippiedom, Bono sent back a note saying, "One -- but not the same." Unconsciously, this became his hook. As the melody flowed, he was thinking about untouchable sadness, disharmony and disease and relationships that end too soon. Within half an hour, they had recorded the bare bones of what Noel Gallagher now calls "the greatest song ever written."
(from "Gold in the house", GQ Magazine, October 2001)
Amazon.co.uk: Another song that seems to have changed meaning -- so much so that it seems to have become an anthem for pretty much everything -- is "One," from Achtung Baby.
Bono: Which astounds me. What's great about "One" is that it's not about oneness, it's about difference. That's the trick of that tune. I'm always shocked when a drunk couple come up to me in a club and tell me they want to walk down the aisle to it. It's a song about difference, and it's gnarly. It's a long way from "Up with People."
Amazon.co.uk: Can you remember what you thought you were writing about at the time?
Bono: There were a couple of things going on, and as usual I meant to resolve them, but the best U2 songs seem to occupy this place of contradictions. I had a lot of things going on in my head at the time, about forgiveness, about father and son angst. I was trying to write a story song I think, and I'm just not good at that. The lyrics came really quickly. The humbling bit about songwriting is that anything above good usually feels like an accident. A lot of U2 songs are first drafts.
(from an interview on All That You Can't Leave Behind, Amazon UK)
[Edge:] "It was autumn 1990. We were in Berlin, at Hansa Studios where Bowie recorded 'Heroes,' trying to get traction with some new songs. It wasn't going well. Adam and Larry's rather jaundiced view of Bono's and my songwriting ability was becoming more and more evident as our various experiments went nowhere. We were listening to a lot of industrial music, and the sounds we were making were quite intense.
"In the midst of all this I go off into another room to put together some ideas for 'The Fly.' I came back with two, neither of which worked where they were meant to, but on Daniel Lanois's suggestion we put them together and Bono was really taken with it. So we all went out into the big recording room -- a huge, eerie ballroom full of ghosts of the war -- and everything fell into place. Bono's melodies and phrases were following, and by the end of the day we basically had everything, the whole form of the song.
"Everyone recognized it was a crucial moment in the development of what became 'Achtung Baby' -- ironically it went in a totally different direction from everything we'd been working on. But everyone recognized it was a special piece. It was like we'd caught a glimpse of what the song could be. Then it was about capturing its essence, but also trying to keep our hands off it. Those songs that seem to arrive perfectly formed -- you don't want to mess with them too much.
"The lyric was the first in a new, more intimate style. It's two ideas, essentially. On one level it's a bitter, twisted, vitriolic conversation between two people who've been through some nasty, heavy stuff: 'We hurt each other / Then we do it again.' But on another level there's the idea that 'we get to carry each other.' 'Get to' is the key. The original lyric was 'we have to carry each other' and it was never quite right -- it was too fuckin' obvious and platitudinous. But 'get to'… it's like our privilege to carry one another. It puts everything in a different perspective, introduces that idea of grace.
"Still, it blows me away when it's played at weddings. I wouldn't have played it at any wedding of mine. But I suppose it's because, despite all the other stuff in there, the power of 'we get to carry each other' overwhelms everything. And the honesty of it helps -- the bare-knuckle telling-it-like-it-is-ness.
"I also think it opened up new horizons for U2. It's not a song we would ever try to rewrite. We wouldn't want to go there again. But the small scale of it, the intimacy, has been revisited for various other records and songs. The restraint was something new -- we learned how holding back can be even more powerful than letting go."
(from "The 1001 Best Songs Ever" Special Edition, Q Magazine, November 2003 (?))
