Props to Bono for managing to look even older than Springsteen.
Regarding Mercy and Dan's post above, it's clear that any version they release different from what was leaked is going to be a mistake. If you think U2 in 2024 is going to improve on anything they did 20 years ago you're insane. And removing the "ripping the stitches" pre-chorus is an absolute mortal sin. "On top of that, "You want to kill me and I want to die" is a terrible rewrite.
What makes the original so good is its sprawl, and deviating from the more direct/streamlined writing and recording on ATYCLB and HTDAAB. And before any idiots chime in about it being "unfinished", let's remind everyone that according to the interview in the 2004 Blender magazine article it was dropped from the original tracklisting along with Fast Cars because Larry (the true villain of this band) thought the album was too long. Since the version of the latter song that they released as a bonus track is "finished", there's no reason to assume that Mercy wasn't as well, not to mention it fits the description in the article.
Receipts:
As it stands, the album is three seconds shy of an hour and, as Bono says, “too much of a good thing is a bad thing,” so drastic measures need to be taken. “I have a theory,” Mullen begins, and a reverential silence descends as the drummer — traditionally the first band member to be shouted down in these situations — states his case. After just five minutes, it has been unanimously decided that the track “Mercy,” a six-and-a-half-minute outpouring of U2 at its most uninhibitedly U2-ish, must go. Hence a song that any self-respecting band would be proud to call a single becomes what Bono immediately anoints “the best B-side you’ve ever heard.” Later, another more experimental candidate entitled “Fast Cars” (“an Irish/Mexican vibe”) gets evicted, and the album becomes a lean and lithe 11 tracks.
The song didn’t disappear however, in November of that year, just after the album was released, “Mercy” appeared on the internet as a low quality digital file. The song was initially posted on the Interference message boards, by a fan who claimed to have gotten the song from a friend. That friend, would later tell the message board that he had received a copy of the album about a week and a half before the album was released, and it was given to him on cassette by a friend at Interscope Records. The cassette was digitized and burned to CD, and it was played for a group of fans at a house party, and was later ripped from that CD and uploaded to Interference the week of the album release. The claim was made that the song on the cassette sounded unmastered and that some of the levels seemed ‘funky’ even in that format.
What we get from this is that it was still part of the full album in a leaked version, the person didn't get an isolated recording of just Mercy by itself. The reason for the low quality is because it was from a cassette. Not because it's a demo, or hadn't been mixed yet.
Sorry if this is old news to most of you, but there's always some buffoon that wants to chime in that this track wasn't completed and uses this to argue against the quality of the song.
