Doesn't the title of this thread mean we all have to choose 'One'?
For me, although it flips around sometimes, the song that dug its way deepest into my heart is Ultraviolet.
I suppose I could just as easily say Streets. Or Angel of Harlem. Or NYD. I love so many U2 songs, and so many are universally loved, it's hard to pick based on quality. But as a favorite, this little track from side 2 of the Achtung Baby cassette that I wore out just around when I was ending my teenage years has a special place for me.
It's uplifting, in a jaunty lust-for-life sort of way, with Edge's guitar lifting up your ears after the intro professes such confusion and near despair, lightly propelling you on a journey away from the darkness. Yet, the background strings - or is it some sort of organ or horn? - that complete the guitar work and and underly its featheriness with a thick, somber drone keeps you grounded in the fact that you might be stepping lightly away from the dark, but it's over a bed of hot coals. You keep moving to avoid the heat.
Bono pleads to the album's eponymous baby, and it doesn't sound cheesy, or forced, as it should have sounded after the Joshua Tree era's earnestness. It didn't even sound sexist, but rather transcendent.. The baby is his wife, his lover, his mother, his angel, his muse, his God..or the child in himself that died a little when him mother did. We may only know it now, but Ultraviolet was a precursor to Lemon, and then to Iris, and the purple Irises in between that the cameras could not see. And out of the blue comes the operatic bravura of sleeping on stones, and illumination from overhead, and over bed, mixing earthy JT lyrics with the sexier AB seamlessly, and leaving both the listener and the singer seemingly spent.. Until he sings gently to his baby again, tonight.
When I first got my hands on Achtung, I wasn't listening to much music. my mother had died, I was kind of in a numb hole, having just started college and experiencing a huge loss. A friend told me to give it a listen because, despite me hearing the Fly, and thinking it was just noise, he said there was a lot more to it.
So I listened, and Achtung was just a lot of noise. I didn't hear the songs, didn't feel the meaning, didn't experience the usual uplift I got from U2 music. But I tried a few repeats, and then Ultraviolet broke through the noise. The yearning in the middle of the noise clarified it, smoothed everything out, and caught me. I understood .. This was uplifting because of the pain. Because of the struggle, not in spite of it. The rest of the songs soon followed, and the album served as a companion to me for months, and actually opened me up to listening to more music again.
So to this day, that little song will make me smile a semi- sad smile as I pick up my step a little and walk on with a little more life under me.
Sent from my fingertips.