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U2 at the the 2017 MTV Europe Music Awards (EMA) at Wembley Arena in London. While U2 have never got their songs from the news headlines, the fear was that songs written in 2015 and the first half of 2016 now seemed hopelessly out of step with the new political dispensation. “The album was ready to go but we found that the songs that were on it just didn’t reflect the major changes that were happening – both on a political and on a personal level.” “In 2016 the world changed beyond all recognition and we just weren’t sure that the album we had finished was what we wanted to put out in that climate,” Bono told me in Seattle earlier this year. Having missed their early 2016 release slot (standard practice for a band who are notoriously reluctant to hand over master tapes), they wrote a few new songs, reworked others, tried out different producers and by the time they looked up from their mixing desk, Britain had voted to leave the EU and Donald Trump was about to be elected US president. “Brexit and Trump was what went wrong” says Bono now. This is a highly unusual situation for U2 to be in – in that we have a lot of the songs already completed ahead of the release date.”Ī new U2 album and tour in 2016: what could possibly go wrong? ‘The world changed’
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“But we have some more Songs of Innocence dates to do so we’ll release it in early 2016. Okey-dokey Bono, but when is it coming out? “If I had my way, we’d release this album tomorrow,” he said. After a show in Turin, Bono plays me what sounds like a finished and ready-to-go version of Songs of Experience.Īs the songs pump out over Bono’s mobile phone via the car stereo system, he enters into a reverie: “Just listen to Edge’s guitar work on this track” “Larry’s drum break on this is amazing” “This track has a really crunchy beat” “This is among the best work we’ve ever done.” Just as the band had recorded and released the Zooropa album while they toured Achtung Baby in the early 1990s, the idea was to finish SOE off while touring Songs of Innocence during 2015.įorward to September 2015 and U2 are in the final stretch of shows of the Songs of Innocence tour and U2 are as good as their word. The plan then was to do a “Zooropa” on Songs of Experience. There’s a ‘sister’ album called Songs of Experience also.” “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this but the reason the delay was so long is because we haven’t just been working on Songs of Innocence, we have in fact been working on two albums at the same time. The relief at finally getting the album out is evident from his worried remark that the gap between the previous No Line On The Horizon album and Songs of Innocence (five and a half years) has been the longest ever gap between U2 albums.
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The links below will take you to a separate page about each LP.Sitting in a windowless room in Apple’s Cupertino HQ in California in September 2014, Bono has just pressed the switch that has made U2’s Songs of Innocence album available to over 500 million iTunes customers. The following pages contain various details about their recording, from where and when it was made to inspiration behind some of the songs on them and guest appearances etc. U2 have produced 17 albums from the release of 'Boy' in 1980 to 'No Line On The Horizon' in 2009, including 2 mini-LPs and 2 'Best Of' collections.