Thanks to/sources: U2 by U2, Niall Stokes’s U2: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song, and ’s lyrics and tour sections.Ģ34. Passengers is excluded except for “Miss Sarajevo” and “Your Blue Room.” Live versions and remixes are treated as the same song and covered in that song’s entry if it’s relevant to its position on the list. This excludes covers, Bono-Edge or Larry Mullen Jr.–Adam Clayton outings (so no Spider-Man and no “Mission: Impossible,” which is a cover anyway).
*The ground rules: This list consists of officially released U2 songs only. What follows is a rundown of every song* U2 has released, ranked in order from worst to best. In honor of the publication of Bono’s memoir, we’ve updated our original list to include Songs of Experience as well as a handful of other official U2 releases. The band assured everyone it would be out not long after the end of the Songs of Innocence tour at the end of 2015, but we didn’t see it until two years later, and they toured The Joshua Tree again before touring Experience. That has given them the luxury to write and record at their leisure, which is what happened with Songs of Experience. Realizing that record sales were, at some point, going to stop being a primary means of income, the band struck highly profitable deals with companies like BlackBerry and Apple. U2 would come roaring back at the turn of the millennium with All That You Can’t Leave Behind just at the moment when no one would’ve blamed any of them for sitting back on their piles of money, pursuing “side projects,” and touring every couple of years behind their catalogue. Those guitar melodies became the start of “One” and the beginning of what would become Achtung Baby - what Bono called “the sound of four men cutting down the Joshua Tree.” And then, one day, Lanois suggested to the Edge that he combine two separate guitar parts. Every single member of U2 was convinced at one moment or another in the early days at Hansa Studios - the same place that David Bowie, Iggy Pop and others had gone to find magic, or at least inspiration - that this was the end of U2. In the search for that dream, Bono decided that if U2 decamped to Berlin with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, something had to happen. It took tremendous foresight for U2 to take a break and a fair amount of fortitude to stand onstage and inform your audience that “… this is the end of something for U2 … We have to go away and … and dream it all up again.” Record companies certainly want bands to keep doing the thing, over and over again, that made them all that money. And even after achieving international fame and fortune with The Joshua Tree, their fifth album, back in 1987, they came crashing back to earth with its follow-up, Rattle and Hum, which every rock critic in the world interpreted as U2 trying to teach America about American music.īy the end of the ’80s, U2 could have just kept moving forward with their existing formula and maybe eked out another few years with that pattern.
No record label still in business today would have let them release a third album after the battles around the second one. The traditional path to success in the music industry pretty much no longer exists, and if it did, a band like U2 never would have gotten the creative control they asked for - and received. Yes, they own houses in the south of France and show up in the occasional gossip column and Bono jets off to Davos every year, but they are still very much a band, and there’s something remarkable in the fact that they continue to remain a going concern. U2 are, at this point, the only rock band of their stature that still has the original lineup: No one’s overdosed, no one’s been fired, no one’s left the group in pursuit of a solo career. put up a notice at Mount Temple Comprehensive School: “Drummer seeks musicians to form band.” This is how the members of U2 met, a moment specifically commemorated in Bono’s new memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (out November 1). In 1976, a student named Larry Mullen Jr.
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