Note: A long text will follow, and a summary of track-by-track analysis is found at the very end.
The following is 100% unofficial made-up content, speculation based on known track titles and previous statements thus, nothing in the following article is real.
I have too much time on my hands, I know, but in my defence I wrote this in little pieces over a longer peroid of time - so there might be typos in there.
U2 to step into unknown sonic territory in late 2010
The original plan for U2 was to treat their fans with a sister-album to be released later in 2009 following-up its latest album, No Line On The Horizon released last year.
Instead U2 frontman Bono and guitarist The Edge found new inspiration while on the road in America and went straight into the studio in the south of France after concluding the final leg of the U2 360 Tour in 2009. The duo began an intense two week writing session in France followed by another two weeks in a studio located on Manhattan in New York City, where they generated fresh material for the upcoming album, still with the working title Songs of Ascent. "We have always been writing songs while on tour. Pride
[In The Name of Love, ed. Note] as it happens, took shape on the road back in the 80's, so it's nothing new to us at all really" Bono explains. Presently, the band has once again assembled in the Morrocoan city of Fez, and invited me for a preview of some tracks from the album, due to be released in the fourth quarter of 2010.
"The final couple of shows at the end of last year, we had a couple of the best shows of our lives in a lot of respects. Bono and I left the stage so excited that we went straight to the studio in the south of France and recorded new songs in a heartbeat - quite literally. Adam and Larry were brought in at a later stage of course." The Edge adds in. "One of the first things we did after getting our rough ideas on tape in France, was to go back to the material we had previously worked on with Danny and Brian in Fez. We scrutinized the stuff we had and decided what we wanted to build on and what to simply leave in the vaults for another time." After the initial small talk, mixing assistant Declan Gaffney cues up the album tracks as we have a listen to what has happened to those rough ideas from last fall and the summer 2007 sessions in Morocco. Drummer Larry Mullen, in his obvious role of keeping the band together for 30 years onwards, strikingly describes the band as a "four-legged table" when he talks about the opening track: "Selecting the tracklist of the album is always a time-consuming process, and a lot of thought is put into it." "And a couple of friendly quarrels, too" Bono jokes. "Well, even for short periods of time, the table may become a little unstable." Mullen continues as he reveals a rare smile.
The opening track of the new album is entitled
"Terra Icognita" one of the tracks recorded in Fez which opens up calmly bursting into a cascade of an uptempo section ending with an acapella section. Oozing of exotic instruments and soaring Sufi chants, it also bears traces of typical fingerprints from producer Brian Eno. One of those are the electro-beginnings that himself and co-producer Daniel Lanois works on before the band enters the studio in the mornings. For this track, Eno brought with him the Swiss produced Hang, a hand-played steel percussion instrument which contributes very well to the electronical feel of the album despite what one might expect from this rather analogue instrument. "Edge and myself attended the Sacred Musical Festival during our stay here in Fez and we we're so intrigued by this Persian singer whom we saw playing a 45 minute set, Parissa and her ensemble, that we invited her to our little riad to see if we could work on something. It was a very exciting meeting and now you can hear the fruit of that musical seed at the very beginning of this song" Bono tells me. "Larry is usually banging away behind his acoustic drum kit, but for this song his approach was dramatically different...I gotta say his performance on this instrument is rather extraordinary combined with that Iranian santoor, [recently also used by rivals Coldplay (Life in Technicolor) and Simple Minds (Blood Type O) ed. note], and string section which Parissa's people contributed to the opening of our album. Dan is a native speaker of French, growing up in Quebec as a kid, so he got to interpret for us when organizing the musicians and I think it turned out to be one of the best if not the best opening track ever."
Larry admits that he was initially reluctant to "play an U.F.O. drum" as he's been suffering from tendonitis since many years back and nearly had to quit his career in the music business. "I think it was his distinct determination to impress Eno that ultimately made him stand up to the challenge of performing with complete strangers used to play in different time signatures." says bassist Adam Clayton and the second half of U2's remarkable rhythm section.
The next track is called
"Mercy", a song which was intended to be included on How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb from 2004 but was left off at the last minute. The song is a conversation with God in a much more direct sense than in "Unknown Caller" from the last album. The opening lines are "I was drinking some wine/And it turned to blood/What's the use of religion/If you're any good" and later on in the song the desperate prayer turns into a manifest of love when Bono as the emperor Nero later in the song describes his relationship to his wife Alison, or perhaps U2's fans: "You love me, too much/You always loved me, too much". The song concludes by a simple statement; Bono is being reborn, perhaps a reference to the song which was discussed to be the opening track of the last album.
"After finishing How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb and the Vertigo Tour, we felt like we didn't necessarily wanted to return with another straight-forward Rock 'n' Roll kind of album. Funny enough, this song hung around for a while and we couldn't really decide what to do with it. I think it has finally found it's home among this particular collection of songs now that we tweaked it with Brian and Danny" says Clayton of the bombastic track.
When British rivals Coldplay came around and had their hit song "Clocks" topping the charts, fans of U2 might've cried foul play as the song is reminiscent of the Irish supergroup's 1984 title track "The Unforgettable Fire" with it's driving piano melody. Bono famously declared in 1988 that "Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles, we're stealing it back!" about covering "Helter Skelter", and now the time has come for U2 to steal back their fans from Coldplay with the beautiful piano ballade
"Thank You For The Day". Bono tells me about the origins of the song: "It actually started out as a one of my homework assignments when I was taking piano lessons a couple of years ago. Then I called Daniel Lanois and he came up with this great title, which I really liked and during a trip to Ghana later that year the lyrics for the song started to emerge out of nowhere. I hope Danny doesn't mind that I hijacked his song, he had his own version which he liked to perform on tour you see. We had to rework it a little bit since we used part of it in a song called I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight off the last record." The song follows in the same vein as Mercy, a man speaking to his maker, thanking him for sending Jesus Christ to Earth. Furthermore, the song also deals with the frustration and impotency which Bono sometimes experiences during his travels the African continent: "There's no midnight please/Africa in debris/There's a harbour in a safe port/The truth you will extort/There was no price to pay/Thank you for the day." "I felt like smashing my sunglasses at one time, G8 politicians were not keeping their promises given to these people, promises supported by their own handwriting."
The first of the tracks from the more recent sessions in France and New York to make an appearance is
"Winter", a song which originally was thought for inclusion on No Line On The Horizon but it was later adopted by Irish film maker Jim Sheridan for his remake of Danish film "Brødre" released in 2004. Larry Mullen says that the band had considered two songs for the movie, the other one being White As Snow which ended up on the album. Being a member of the rhythm section, Larry wasn't too fond of the laid-back version which was used in the film. "It's one thing to start discussing whether to use drum machines for a song or an album, but to reduce my effort is another thing altogether" he says in a slightly upset tone. "I argued that it deserved another chance and Larry sounded fantastic on the last album, so naturally we wanted to see how far we could make use of that. What I did was basically to recharge it's batteries and this orchestrated beauty of a song dramtically evolved into something electronical and magically came to life." Edge comments.
"Sleeptalk" was one of the new songs that the band improvised together on the road. The first actual uptempo track of the album appears to be some sort of a rock'n'roll lovechild, incorporating bits of "Breathe" and "Mysterious Ways". Adam is eager to explain to me where the song came from: "We first played it at a soundcheck in Gothenburg on the last tour. It started with Edge having a chord progression in his mind, then Larry and I came in to provide some groove before Bono improvised melodies on top of that. It was obviously in a very rough shape at the time, but it turned out to be a wonderful little gem and we will probably have lots of fun with it on the road in the future."
Yet another track to get the boot from No Line On The Horizon,
"Every Breaking Wave", took shape around an emotive Bono vocal and heavily relies on its electronica influences that probably dictated the change in direction away from an album of traditional folk music and Sufi hymns. Here we find even more cascades of guitars weaved together to form a rigid meshwork of signature sounds from The Edge. "I wanted to see what would happen if we took "With Or Without You" and dressed it up in a futurstic 21st century suit." says the guitarist. The minimalistic "less-is-more" approach which The Edge adopted from a very early stage in the bands career works astoundingly well for this slow-burning track, that explodes at the climax, brimming with passion and intensity. "I dare suggest that Every Breaking Wave is probably my favourite song on the album, and it also contains some of Bono's best vocals if you ask me." concludes the lead guitarist.
As the song selected to be the lead single of the album comes to an end, my ears are met by a tranquil guitar melody in the key of B minor. The track is entitled
"Palace to Placement" and revolves around a piece which was brought to the sessions in Fez by Daniel Lanois called "Tamboura". "Palace to Placement demanded that I brought forward the jazzy side of myself, and I haven't really kept in touch with it over the years since we recorded Velvet Dress more than a decade ago." Larry tells me. "What's else is that the original drum part in Danny's song was recorded by Brian Blade, an acknowledged jazz musician himself, so it was definately a challenge for me to match his characteristic playing but I also incorporated parts that I felt belonged to my own repertoir. Without Dan's neverending support in my back, it would've probably been more difficult than it was."
The song never really ends but rather morphs into the next track,
"Velvet Hearts". Larry goes on to explain how this happened: "The next song as it happens actually started out as an improvisation by using a combination of Brian Eno's iPhone applications Bloom and Air. Brian recently started experimenting with a randomized approach like this, generative music he calls it. It was exciting to start out with a randomly generated loop as a tender foundation to build on. Bono joked that we wouldn't need Brian to come in anymore. We felt that it would fit nicely tied to the end of 'Palace' since they exchange air so to speak, and it's only the second time ever that we have had a medley of this magnitude before. The last time we did this was on our very first record, "Boy". Bono's tired mnidnight vocals come in after over a minute of swimming in Eno's sonic ocean: "Next to your perfect skin/I'm an irritation/Way to serious to take seriously" he groans, longing for his lost sweetheart to return.
Another uptempo rocker born to shake up an entire stadium,
"Marie Antoinette (Everybody Is A Star)", is placed among the final three songs of the album. It starts off with an electro-loop by Eno, reminiscent of "Zoo Station" on the group's 1991 album "Achtung Baby", viciously interrupted by fierce guitar by Edge in turn effectively backed up by Clayton. Bono tells me of the prechorus where he pretends to be a star in the sky, boldly raving on about how he has defeated the sun and won the affection of the moon, French queen Marie Antoinette: "The sun is gone/Feel like I won/Can you feel it love?/My true love" before the song makes an unexpected turn to an exotic place for the chorus: "Please be a star/let me lose, then fall/Everybody is a star". "I was using a reference to Joséphine de Beauharnais on the last record, so I wanted to take it a step further and what better than to illustrate the struggle to win the heart of a royalty?" he sniggers mischieveously.
The Edge tells us that the instrumental track that follows,
"House of Abraham", was one of the first jam sessions with the musicians from Fez in 2007. "It seems like Brian Eno started recording and we were all totally unaware of it, so what you hear is how this track develops, twists and turns and then finish off with variations on the theme we came up with. We turned it into this strange beast of a collaboration, in fact we called it "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" for a while there." The Edge says and laughs.
The album finishes with the track
"Kingdom Of Your Love", used to open the Irish quartet's 2009 tour concerts. Apart from the intriguing instruments and chants that should be familiar to U2's fans by now, the song features an instrumental middle piece with friend Andrea Corr on Irish tin whistle. "Bringing Andrea in was my suggestion," Bono admits " I just felt like there was something missing and realized that Irish music isn't all to different from the traditional music played in the Arabic world, you know - they partly overlap." The album closes with the singer reciting selected verses from the psalms included in the actual "Songs of Ascent" and with that the album has gone full cycle. "Brian [Eno] likes to tell us how arabic music is cyclic, so it felt like a natural way to end the album" Bono concludes.
Song-By-Song BREAKDOWN:
1. Terra Incognita - Intriguing album opener with exotic instrumentation where Iranian santoor, tabla drums, oriental strings and futuristic Hang clashes with unmistakingly chiming guitars from The Edge.
"I wanted to take the track to a more arabic sounding place, so I brought out my 12-string guitar for this one" he says "It's a shame we probably won't be able to recreate it in a live setting" Bono adds.
2. Mercy - Soaring U2 anthem with masterful vocal delivery from Bono and signature ambient soundscapes from Brian Eno. Key lyric: "Love's got to be with the weak/Only then love gets a chance to speak".
3. Thank You For The Day - Daniel Lanois/Bono collaboration about a person who unwillingly witnesses the crumbling continent of Africa, reminding God about the unresolved crisis.
4. Winter - A song brought out of the vaults and reconsidered for the new album, featuring operatic vocals from Bono the tenor and icy, spine-tingling guitar layers from The Edge. The melodies are fueled by the unstoppable Mullen/Clayton rhythm section to back it up. Key lyric: "The Broken and the bruised/The young and the used/The sure and confused, all here".
5. Sleeptalk - U2 picks up the groove in the vein Mysterious Ways for this upbeat track. Key lyric "We won't get no sleep tonight/Sleeptalker, put out your light/Give me a chance to put things right".
6. Every Breaking Wave - The ambitious, electronica-influenced, lead single from the upcoming album. Key lyric: "Is this the end of the line?/I'm brought to life/Violently fighting for my life"
7. Palace to Placement - Tranquil song which bears resemblence to previous jazz venture "If You Wear That Velvet Dress" on "POP".
8. Velvet Hearts - Peaceful transition of African Mbiras playing hide and seek among the stars of the Morrocoan night sky with bluesy slide-guitar solo from The Edge.
9. Marie Antoinette (Everybody Is A Star) - Edge's meeting with Jimmy Page must've rubbed of on him as this heavy rhythm, Zeppelin-rocker shakes the room right up and the minimalistic guitarist delivers a rarely seen intense guitar solo of pure bliss.
10. House of Abraham - Instrumental with playfull basslines and exciting time-signatures.
11. Kingdom Of Your Love - Familiar 360 Tour opener with Bono reciting parts of psalms 120–134 a capella at the end accompanied solely by swallows.
Hahaha Thanks all. Anyone dare to flesh the article out more?
Good enough for you? Let's see how The Slow Loris handles these predictions
Nice use of current events to garner credibility. 
This thread wins already. Can't wait for your Article Simon!
