On the aborted Rick Rubin sessions:
The Edge: I think had we finished the songs, it would have worked, but we sort of hadn’t really finished the songs. It’s typical for us, because it’s in the process of recording that we really do our writing. But we’d almost have to make a record with Brian [Eno] and Danny [Lanois] first, then go and re-record it with Rick Rubin. And we may do that. We did start material with Rick, which I still believe in. I would love to get back to that project at some point. I wouldn’t rule it out.
Adam Clayton: Rick was great; he was very focused and I was excited. The material was of a very high standard, but it sort of became clear that the things that we were interested in — in terms of, once we have a song, we’re interested in the atmospherics and the tones and the overdubs and the different stuff you can do with it — were things that Rick was not in the slightest bit interested in. He was interested in getting it from embryonic stage to a song that could be mixed and put on a record. And we’re almost the kind of band that goes, “Well, sure, you’ve got it to that point, but now how far can you push it?” He was committed to that process of getting it to that finished stage, and then at the point when we were kind of excited to push it further, that’s almost the point when he lost interest.
And I think initially, we had sort of said, “Well, you know, it’s gonna be interesting to do a sort of stripped-down, sort of Rick Rubin, back-to-basics kind of record,” and then as we as we kind of examined that it was like, “Well, all that would be doing is kind of making a kind of slightly better version of what we’ve already done.” And we just didn’t feel that the next record should be that.
I’m sure we’ll go back to those Rick Rubin tunes and that Rick Rubin session, but I guess we just thought, at the time, that wasn’t what we were interested in. We weren’t interested in redefining the basic U2. It would’ve been, you know, no overdubs — just band takes and here it is.
Larry Mullen Jr.: Simple as this, I’ve a huge fan of Rick, he’s a very nice man, an incredibly talented man, but we weren’t ready. He’s got very, very great skills but we are just slightly slow and we don’t learn quickly and we thought we were better than we actually were. So when we went in to record the songs, he was confused and so were we. He did a lot of work, but they weren’t right. And it’s nothing to do with him. At all. And it’s not his fault. It has been reported that he was dropped off the project and whatever — but that’s not true, it was more that we needed to have something to work off of, and that’s what Brian and Danny do.
