Earnie Shavers
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Yes, two producers were confirmed, as well as two types of sessions.
My guess is that the club 'album' is a purely speculative thing, for/from all 'involved.'
I remember reading a similar story about will.i.am going back to Bono's house after they'd gotten plastered at a bar or something, Bono played him new stuff, he made some suggestions, they mucked around, and his involvement with the No Line material casually came from a few days around that. Just ran a quick search trying to find that story again, and lo and behold, the Clooney/Crawford/Will.I.Am night seems to be from the summer of 2008. Which makes perfect sense in line with his involvement on No Line. But the fucking around could have been with anything, come from anything, spawned anything - large or small.
So anyway, I would again make the point that they work far more loosely and casually than some people seem to think. That ideas/material/'projects' blur and run over each other. No need to be so black and white about different projects, because I definitely don't think U2 are. Bono says U2 have a bunch of club sounding material that they'd like to work on with Guetta, Will.i.am and RedOne. David Guetta suggests he's not working with U2, only that they've talked about it. Will.i.am says he is working on U2's 'new album', talks about playing some of their collaborative material two years ago to some people and they liked it. Meanwhile, they're wrapping up an album right now that is most likely a Danger Mouse produced effort that got nailed down only over the past six months.
I still don't get why everything has to be so definitive and formal. They are clearly casual/loose until the last few stages of any process. Pretty clear to me that they have some material that sounds a certain way, it might be relatively new or it might be stuff they've messed around with for some time, that they've casually had some involvement with it from some others and have probably talked it up quite a bit with them (it's Bono, and it's will.i.am - can you even imagine the circle of mutual hype between those two?) but I think it's still a massive leap to make such definitive assumptions about 'albums' and formal, signed onto the job 'producers' or anything.
Seriously. In the end, it could turn out that Will.i.am has had some kind of involvement with the 'new'/mainly DM produced album. Similar to No Line, he's been a sort of creative consultant/input adder on some tracks stemming from some periods of fucking around with them or something. Or it could turn out that they have managed to flesh out some of this 'club' stuff with him over time - two years, at least, from initial exposure/input is plenty of time to go backwards and forwards on some stuff, or had more decent time together - and he and perhaps at least Bono are jumped up over it, hyping it up between them. Or it could turn out that there's been some casual involvement, and there's a casual understanding that they'd like to turn it into something at some point in the not too distant future.
But I certainly wouldn't just assume, for no reason, that U2 have suddenly started working in a very formal, orderly fashion. Or that they've suddenly gained some kind of foresight clarity or something. Bet it's all way, way more casual than that.