A moment later the U2 frontman had cranked up a track from the band's work-in-progress album, an anthemic number about leaving one's hometown titled "Invisible." As the song played, he spiritedly played air guitar to it, also belting along with the track's vocals — Bono performing a duet with himself.
The 53-year-old rock star's self-mocking demeanor is enjoyably at odds with his self-serious public image, a sign of an icon who knows when not to be iconic. But similarly surprising is his approach to the music, a kind of boyish giddiness suggesting that, even after 12 studio albums and thousands of shows, that's what matters, perhaps more now than in a long while.
After years of being known as much for activism as rock 'n' roll — the day after the studio session, Nelson Mandela will have passed away, and an essay from Bono recollecting his impressions of the South African leader and close friend will have appeared on Time.com — U2 had perhaps its most commercially disappointing album in decades with 2009's "No Line on the Horizon." So now they're shaking things up.
The band, which also includes guitarist Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullens Jr., came up with the concept of a collection of songs told partly from the perspective of an innocent and partly from a seasoned veteran. And they brought on the electronic dance music producer Danger Mouse to help them craft it. The album is set for an April release.
Told that some fans were still puzzling over how that collaboration would work, Edge, 52, laughed. "I think we're still figuring that out ourselves," he said.
On this December evening the band moved between studio rooms. In one, engineers tried different mixes as Bono sang along and gave notes in equal measure. In another, Mullens, Edge and several others were tinkering with some rhythms. "You're seeing a little bit of creativity as it happens," Mullens said. "Like penguins in the wild."
From the few tracks of the new album heard that night, it has traces of the Clash and Sex Pistols and Kraftwerk — "stuff we were really listening to when we were younger," Bono said. But it also comes laden with soul and old-school R&B, genres Bono said he and friends were listening to in the 1970s "but once punk came along, no one admitted it."
Lyrically, the record will center on the collision between hard-earned wisdom and youthful hunger. For U2 at the moment — at once trying new experiments even as it returns to its roots, still vital even as it stands barely two years shy of its 40th anniversary — that tension couldn't be more fitting.
The band has reportedly been entertaining corporate suitors for a Super Bowl ad to introduce the new record. But Bono waves aside a question about those plans. There's still the album to fine tune. So engineers continued to tinker with Bono's vocal chord-straining falsetto that has defined him as far back as albums like "War" and "The Unforgettable Fire."
"There's just something about a bloke who sings like a chick," Bono said. And then he turned, took the mike and unleashed another one of those vocals.