Killiney Bay.
You know how SOE is full of callbacks and 're-purposed' parts of SOI?
'Free yourself to be yourself', "13", 'you are rock 'n roll', and all that?
When you hear those parts, you're reminded of the original songs. Those 'interpolations' as they're sometimes known, they sometimes pull you out of the current tune, make you want to go back and compare it to the original, see what's the same, what's changed, which you liked better.
When I first heard Love is Bigger break out into the Killiney Bay line, my first gut response was, "Wow. This is perfect, just perfect. It fits right it, like it's always been there, but new, and lovely and.."
And I almost felt that it could have been pulled from some other, older, perfect song U2 wrote in the past, but nope.. it's sitting right there, a shining new gem of a song.
I remember how U2 once (if we want to go back to the 'evolution of their creative process.. I don't think we do) described their writing process of sort of getting together, jamming ideas out, and *listening* for the songs to emerge. The feeling was that the songs were out there, and U2 were sort of archaeologists, with their instruments being their digging tools. They'd chip and shovel and dust away in their improvisational sessions, and look for the bones of songs to appear, and then 'god' - I guess they're creationists in that respect - would walk through the room and they'd suddenly get a vision of what the final version would be of the song they just unearthed. Then they'd try to capture it on tape with their producers.
Since U2 moved to challenge themselves to a more traditional song-writing approach, you could sort of feel the songs became more constructed than unearthed. There were blueprints and schematics, then the building materials and assembly. Beautiful songs, but you got fewer of those moments where I''d listen to a new U2 song and think, "Wow, how'd they come up with that.. it's like it was always there. I'm surprised it hadn't been written already."
The Killiney Bay section of Love is Bigger - and I'm tempted to say the whole song - feels a lot more like god walked through the room for them one more time.