Monday, January 9, 2017

U2 Detail 'The Joshua Tree' Summer Tour for Rolling Stone

U2 will celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree this year by performing the seminal 1987 album in its entirety at stadiums across America and Europe, including a stop at Bonnaroo. The festival slot will mark the group's first-ever headlining set at an U.S. festival. The tour - which features Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers and OneRepublic rotating as opening acts - kicks off May 12th at BC Place in Vancouver and wraps up July 1st at FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland before heading over to Europe for a run of eight shows with Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds.
U2: The Joshua Tree Tour 2017 will mark the group's first time playing a classic album in concert. They picked one packed with hits, including "Where The Streets Have No Name," "With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." For hardcore fans, the tour is an opportunity to hear rarely played deep cuts like "Exit," "Trip Through Your Wires" and "In God's Country." It will also feature the first live performance of "Red Hill Mining Town."

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, U2 guitarist The Edge says they're still figuring out how to structure the show. "The show might not necessarily start with Track 1, Side 1 'Where The Streets Have No Name' because we feel like maybe we need to build up to that moment," he says. "So we're still in the middle of figuring out exactly how the running order will go."
To celebrate the upcoming tour, the group released a teaser video looking both back and ahead.



The idea to take The Joshua Tree on tour came last year when U2 were putting the finishing touches on their upcoming album Songs of Experience. "The election happened and suddenly the world changed," says Edge. "We just went, 'We've got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what's going on in the world.'"
The band noticed the parallels between the worldwide political situation that gave rise to The Joshua Tree in 1987 and today. As a result, taking it on tour would give them time to re-think the new album. "[The Joshua Tree] was written in the mid-1980s, during the Reagan-Thatcher era of British and U.S. politics," says the guitarist. "It was a period when there was a lot of unrest. It just felt like, 'Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn't have three years ago, four years ago.' We needed to put the album on ice for a minute just to really think about [it] one more time before putting it out; just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say."
Bono shared his thoughts on the tour in a statement. "Recently I listened back to The Joshua Tree for the first time in nearly 30 years," he said. "It’s quite an opera. A lot of emotions which feel strangely current: love, loss, broken dreams, seeking oblivion, polarization ... all the greats ... I’ve sung some of these songs a lot ... but never all of them. I’m up for it, if our audience is as excited as we are ... it’s gonna be a great night."


http://www.rollingstone.com/

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