Happy Birthday, Edge!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EDGE!!! THE BEST OF DAYS FOR YOU!!! 

The Edge on the role food can play in fighting disease

The Edge - on the role food can play in fighting disease as well as his take on the state of the music industry

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The Edge collaborates on new horse sculpture

U2 guitarist The Edge has unveiled a sculpture he has been working on, which imagines "a zebra crossed with an Arabian horse" as part of a charity art fundraiser for children and injured jockeys.

The musician worked with his friend and regular collaborator, Irish artist Duda, to create the piece, which is entitled Sheba, for the under stARTers orders 21 horse art exhibition in Naas in Co. Kildare.

The public art exhibition and charity fundraiser saw 21 life-sized fibreglass horses painted by some of Ireland’s most highly-acclaimed artists.

Speaking about his creation, The Edge commented "This is a wonderful initiative to be a part of in aid of two most worthy charities, Irish Injured Jockeys and Sensational Kids.

"Duda has captured my vision of Sheba perfectly, I’m thrilled with it. The concept is a simple one: I’ve always loved zebras but as a kid discovered that they could never be tamed or ridden like their cousin the horse. This is my fantasy: a cross between an Arabian horse and a zebra!" 

The exhibition was launched at Naas Racecourse on Saturday 21 of Ireland’s top equine artists were asked to paint their own unique version of a life-sized resin fibreglass horse sculpture.

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Bono and Edge busk for the homeless at festive charity gig in Dublin

Bono and The Edge joined by host of other Irish musicians for fundraising show

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Mon 24 Dec 2018 21.11 GMTLast modified on Mon 24 Dec 2018 21.41 GMT

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 The Edge and Bono of U2 take part in the annual Christmas Eve busk in Dublin. Photograph: Lorraine O’Sullivan/PA

Bono has joined The Edge at the annual Christmas Eve charity busking session outside the Gaiety theatre in Dublin, performing along with a host of other famous Irish musicians in aid of the city’s homeless.

The event took place in support of the Simon Community, a homelessness charity that helps people who are homeless or at risk of becoming so. It was Bono’s first appearance at the charity gig in three years, and his seventh overall.

30,000 empty homes and nowhere to live: inside Dublin’s housing crisis

 

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The U2 members serenaded onlookers with a song from their latest album, as well as two Christmas carols – O Holy Night and O Night Divine – before they were joined by an ensemble to sing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), a rock song originally sung by Darlene Love in 1963. Bono told the crowd: “As the buckets go around, fill them with silver, fill them with hope – [it’s] the season of hope.”

Darragh Doyle@darraghdoyle

Definite highlight of the Dublin Charity Busk for homeless services - Philip, currently in a Dublin hostel, sings with @glen_hansard #Dublin

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Crowds had gathered around a makeshift stage on Grafton Street from 4pm on Monday. Other performers included organiser Glen Hansard, Damien Rice, Danny O’Reilly, Imelda May, Luke Clerkin, Mundy and Róisín O.

Rice played a slowed-down cover of Creep, the Radiohead song from their first album, while Hansard played guitar for a rousing rendition of George Michael’s Faith, sung by a man named Philip who is currently in a Dublin hostel and is assisted by the Simon Community.

There are almost 10,000 homeless people across Ireland, including nearly 4,000 children. Inner City Helping Homeless, a Dublin charity, said more than 100 people were found sleeping rough on Dublin’s streets on Sunday night. Affordable new houses are not being built quickly enough and rent rates have risen significantly, campaigners have claimed.

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Happy Birthday!!!

Happy birthday, David Howell Evans (a.k.a. The Edge)!!!

The Edge on U2's 'Experience' Tour: 'This Is For Our Committed Fans'

U2 guitarist the Edge breaks down the group's Experience tour and says he's ready for a break when it wraps at the end of the year.MediaPunch/REX/Shutterstock

The Edge knows that U2's ongoing Experience + Innocence Tour – where they play nearly all of their new LP Songs of Experience and skip most of their big radio hits – isn't for everyone. "We felt like if you wanted to hear the Joshua Tree songs, there was the Joshua Tree tour last year," he says on the phone from Chicago during an off day from the road. "We knew that were people probably came to the Joshua Tree show that have not come to this knowing it was going to be more weighted towards the new albums, and that's fine. This is for the fans of our more recent work, the more committed fans who really listen to everything and go to everything. We feel OK about that."

At what point in the planning stage for the tour did you decide you weren't going to do any songs off The Joshua Tree?

It came to us, really, as the show was sort of coming into focus. We were actually on the Joshua Tree tour and I started throwing set list ideas towards Bono and [creative director] Willie [Williams] and they were throwing them back at me and early on it became this thing of "Hey, why don't we just conceive of a show without anything from The Joshua Tree because that's what we're doing right now?" If we can avoid playing any songs from The Joshua Tree it would inevitably clear the set list, which would be quite a change, quite fresh, a new sort of thing. Some of those songs we've played pretty consistently since they first entered a U2 set list. I don't think we haven't played "Where the Streets Have No Name" ... might have been one show, but it's basically been a fixture. We liked the idea that we were forcing ourselves to think in a different way. We felt the result would be something different and fresh.

"Love Is All We Have Left" is a much quieter show-opener than what you've done in the past.

When the album was nearly done we started having conversations with Willie and [stage designer] Es Devlin. We also had done the Innocence + Experience tour with the two of them. We made the decision a while ago that this was a two-album set, so the two tours would relate to one another. We all came to the conclusion that the production setup with the screen down the venue of the middle should be retained for the second tour, that that would be the connective tour for the two shows. Then we were like, "OK, that Innocence + Experience show had a real through line and a clear narrative and a shape where we started off as a punk rock band on the main stage and after 25 minutes of pretty straightforward rock & roll this screen finally arrived out of the ceiling. That was a surprise for a lot of people that hadn't seen photographs of the show. It was like, "Wow." This object arrives.

For this show, we felt the most interesting thing would be that people come in and there is the object. It's there already. It's dividing the venue in two. Rather than starting with a punk rock beginning we were like, "Let's start with the opposite. Something very still, very meditative." "Love Is All We Have Left" presented itself as a great song to use to open this show, though it was definitely in response to the last show, but it also felt like a logical opening for this tour and for this record.

Since I saw you on opening night you've added "Gloria" into the set.

We're trying to juggle a few different things here. For sure, the production has a certain impact on how the show progresses. There was a narrative aspect, but we were also trying to hold onto ... not that we necessarily have to tell a complete story, but the skeleton, the spine of that narrative was something we found quite useful for us to keep us disciplined and keep a certain direction and focus. The final thing, which is probably why we put "Gloria" in, was finding the right combination of songs that start to generate the momentum of a great show because that's what people come to see, a great show, a rock & roll band.
On opening night we were slightly unhappy about the fourth song being "Beautiful Day." It didn't quite land the way we wanted it to, so we thought, it's probably just a little early. It's one of those songs that means so much to people, but probably needs to be given a better setup, so we were looking at also the arc of the show. Part of the thinking was we open at the end of Innocence, "Love Is All We Have Left," "Blackout," "Lights of Home." Those are our three songs that deal with mortality. They are very much songs of experience. Then we felt like, "Great, you open with that. Now you have to go back to the beginning very quickly to start the story from where it really starts, which is the really early days and the Songs of Innocence."

Although "Beautiful Day" is, to us, the pivot moment, we realized that the pivot moment might be to really go back to the beginning with "I Will Follow" and "Gloria." It fulfilled two roles. First of all, it helped with the momentum and made "Beautiful Day" feel like you'd earned it when it had finally arrived. And from the narrative point of view it seemed slightly more logical. In fact early on, "Gloria" had been an idea, but we sort of shied away from it because on the earlier tour we had a whole brace of very early songs in the early part of the show. It felt like, "Oh, are we repeating ourselves too much here? Same beats?" But I think it actually means something different in this context because you have this suite of Experience songs and you've really started the show in a completely different kind of way.

"Until the End of the World" was never a single, but you seem to play it every tour. What about that song makes it work in any context in your live show?

That's a very good question. I think it's an amazing song live because it really showcases everything the band does best. In terms of its visceral energy and impact, it's one of those songs that's hard to beat. In the context of these Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience shows, it fits thematically perfectly. It's got references to mortality, to all the big questions. It's been a bit like "Where the Streets Have No Name" in that it's found its way into most of our shows since it was first played live.

Was "Acrobat" a nod to fan demand?

I think we did take a little bit of a nudge from fans of the song and of the band who really thought it would be great to hear live. In planning this tour, we had a smaller pool of songs to draw from since we made the decision to not draw anything off The Joshua Tree. It kind of forced us to start considering deeper cuts and "Acrobat" and "Staring at the Sun." We played "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" as well. That was fun for us. Having never played it live it was, like, a bit of a project to go back and figure out how it worked. Luckily, as with most of my guitar parts, once you figure it out you realize it's kind of simple. [Laughs] So that was a nice realization. We tried that in rehearsal and everyone was like, "This is going to work. This sounds great."

It's challenging from a sonic point of view because Larry is playing on the tom-toms, which in a big venue can become really indistinct. But with Larry and [audio director] Joe [O'Herlihy] and his tech Sam [O'Sullivan] working away they really nailed it. They got a great drum sound for it now, which is really working well in the big venues.

You played "Pride" on the Joshua Tree tour, but it felt very fresh when you paired it with the video of MLK and the peace marches of today. Is that why you wanted to bring it back?

The very first set list didn't have "Pride" in it when we were kicking ideas around six, nine months ago. But as we started to really hone in on the set list we realized that was going to be a crucial moment. "Staring at the Sun" was on the list, but it was really when we started to pair it with the video images that we realized what a pivotal moment it would be, going from it into "Pride." That really happened in Montreal a number of weeks before our opening night. It was not something we had figured out a long time in advance. That's the fun and the jeopardy of the way these shows come together for us – a lot of the most powerful ideas come fairly late in the process when you're starting to piece everything together and you start to see where things are pointing and what the opportunities are.

Obviously, we were going to refer to the politics of the moment. That was an obvious thing for us, but it was a case of how. Without getting into finger-wagging and the stuff that maybe can come over a little trite, we wanted to keep it about issues and make it about the songs finding a new resonance in the times we find ourselves in.

You're playing in some deeply red states when you hit Tulsa and Omaha. You never say "Trump." You show the marchers. It's an effective way to get your message across.

Yeah. I think what's coming through now, even more strongly since the first couple of shows, is this theme of really making it about issues and not tribal politics and that compromise is not a bad word. We've seen it in Ireland. We've seen it up close in the most difficult circumstances, how people with histories that you would assume make them completely incompatible politically have found ways to find common ground over issues and move forward. I think Bono certainly in his own work with the One Campaign has found great success working with people with political beliefs that he just can't agree with. But he can agree on one or two issues and that's enough to move forward. I think we really didn't want to get into a kind of name-calling or finger-wagging. We wanted to get to the important stuff and deal with that. That's the way forward.

The video before "One" with your daughter is a nice way to get into women's rights.

Yeah. Sian is so not a kind of performer by nature or attention-seeker. She is very zen and very still and not self-conscious, not a show-off. That quality in her has made the image very powerful.


Ending on "13 (There Is a Light)" is a quiet, dark way to end the show.

It is very somber, but the whole show is challenging. It was very challenging to fit it together and get it to flow and make sense technically and musically and storytelling-wise. The challenge for us is also not to panic if that the thing that most often happens in a U2 show, which is just the place goes completely nuts ... This is a show where people are watching and thinking as well as dancing around the room. And that's OK. Ending on "13" is really not a U2 thing to do. Traditionally we would end on a kind of big crescendo, a big number and leave everyone exhausted. This is a very contemplative place to bring people.

You've toured a lot in the past few years. Will you take a long break when this one ends?

I think there's been three tours that have been on each other's heels pretty quickly. I would say that we'll probably take a little bit of a break at the end of this tour and regroup. There's lots of ideas for the next records, but I think a bit of time off just to listen to music and to really feed our creative instincts is in order.

I spoke to Adam and he said the Apollo Theater show is going to be very different and full of surprises. Can you say anything about that?

I think the venue and lack of production leads us to think about it as something quite distinct. So, yeah, we haven't figured it out yet. By my instincts say it will be a more raw, lo-fi affair rather than ... We're utilizing technology in a very major way with this show, so I think we'll go the other way for that show.


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Bono and Edge on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show"

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The Edge on U2's 'Songs of Experience,' Bono's 'Brush With Mortality'

U2 guitarist the Edge explains how a major scare in Bono's life caused big changes to the band's new LP 'Songs of Experience.' Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

By Andy Green

The past three years have tested U2 in different ways, from the fierce backlash they received for gifting 2014's Songs of Innocence to every iTunes user to Bono's devastating bicycle accident, which left him with several fractured bones and a shattered left arm. But those setbacks didn't compare to another crisis Bono faced last year. "He had a brush with mortality," says the Edge, choosing his words carefully (the band won't go into detail on the matter). "He definitely had a serious moment, which caused him to reflect on a lot of things."

The episode caused the band to rethink Songs of Experience, a companion to Songs of Innocence that they had already been working on for more than two years. The resulting LP features less of the slick production that defined Innocence, in favor of a more classic formula: propulsive guitar rockers and ballads that look inward. "I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt," says Bono. "So a lot of the songs are kind of letters – letters to [my wife] Ali, letters to my sons and daughters."

The day after U2 played a show at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Edge called up Rolling Stone to talk about the long road to Songs of Experience and look ahead to next year's arena tour in support of the album. (We also conducted an extensive email interview with Bono that will be going up shortly.)

I see you guys debuted "You're the Best Thing About Me" last night. How did that go?

I wouldn't say it was the best we'll ever play it, but it was good. We hadn't played there recently and the crowd was really into it. I think it was one of the better shows.

You started Songs of Experience in 2014, and some of the shows go back even before that. The world has changed so much since then. How did those external factors change the focus and scope of the album?Mostly what we wanted to do was sit back and see how we felt about it coming out into a world that had taken a big lurch in a different direction. We weren't assuming we'd have to start again and, in fact, we didn't need to. The changes that occurred were predominantly lyrical, and in some cases they were quite subtle. A couple of songs subtly shifted to just sort of emphasize one aspect or better express what we were feeling and the ideas we wanted to put into it. But from a musical point of view, what happened with this delay, which was kind of amazing and great, is that we had all of the songs figured out and most of them recorded to the extent that they were releasable towards September of last year. But a year ago we were kind of feeling that we wanted to explore other production approaches and other ways the songs could be arranged and performed. We felt the band chemistry wasn't as represented as we thought it maybe ought to be.

So in the fall of last year we went back into a room as a band, initially without Bono and then he joined us for a couple of days at the end of the period, and we just played the songs. We played them with half an eye and ear to how they might be performed in a live concert setting. Part of the reason for doing that is that we always went through this kind of routine where we'd record own album, put it out and and then we'd start rearranging the songs live. Then our producers would show up halfway through the tour and they'd be like, "Oh, shit, man, that tune is sounding so cool now. I really wish we'd had that arrangement on the album." Steve Lillywhite used to say, "You guys should finish the album, go on tour with it, learn it, understand the songs fully, and then go back in the studio and re-record it in a week."

We didn't quite do that. We didn't get to perform in front of an audience, but by going back to the rehearsal space and then actually going back to the studio to re-record some of the songs we were able to find a synthesis of the raw band performances and some of the stuff we had created before. We'd sort of import keyboard performances and little ideas we liked from pervious versions and find a way to put them in. It became kind of the best of the band chemistry mixed in with the best of the 21st-century production technology. It's given it a more interesting aesthetic.

I spoke to Bono a couple of months ago and he said he felt thatSongs of Innocence lacked a coherence to the production and should have been more raw.There's this dichotomy to production standards these days where the music listener is used to really precise and simple, stripped-down arrangements so the inaccuracies of a band playing in a room where everything bleeds into everything else is not what's happening. It sounds, dare I say it, old-fashioned. We love when that works for us and we love that feel of people playing in a room, when it sounds fresh. But I think we're also wary of the fact that that sound is associated with 20, 30 years ago. We need to make sure, as we always have done, that we are part of a current conversation that's going in music culture in terms of production, songwriting, melodic structure, all the things that keep the culture moving forward.

What we don't want to be is caught in what I describe as a cultural oxbow lake where others are moving forward and you're still faithfully doing what you've always done, but now you're anachronistic and part of a historical form rather than what's actually pushing the boundaries forward, the flow of where it's going. We'll usually try to have our cake and eat it. We want it both: the hallmarks of the classic band, which is becoming more and more rare, but we also don't want to be perceived, and we don't want to be, a veteran act out of touch with the culture. It's a dance. It's a balance. If we allowed the album to be one extreme or another it would be wrong. It's finding that balance between what we do as a band naturally and then what we can still do in the studio. And the studio is still a songwriting tool for us and the production process is still a songwriting process as well as a production process.

I guess that balance is why you brought in so many different producers for this album.Yeah. I mean, they don't necessarily all work on every song. We ending up bringing in Steve Lillywhite, who we just had this wonderful relationship with in terms of getting in the room and working out arrangements and the minutiae of drum parts and guitar parts. Steve is just a wonderful facilitator for all of us go kind of get into ideas and refine our thing. We've also got Jacknife Lee, who we have worked with for many years. He's got this fascination with hip-hop production and he also works with guitar bands, so he has a foot in a couple of different camps.

Then you have Andy Barlow. He's a full on electronica and synthesizer producer that's not really used to bands or guitars, but he's amazing in other ways. Ryan Tedder is an amazing collaborator and his melodic sense is just so strong. When we're around Ryan these songs get better and better. The choruses get better. The hooks get better. The arrangements get more lean and more focused. And then Jolyon Thomas is a great state-of-the-art rock & roll producer in that he gets and loves bands. He gets and loves guitars, but at the same time what is the right guitar sound so you don't come across like you aren't right up to the minute. There are subtle things sometimes, just the difference between a White Stripes guitar sound and a Led Zeppelin guitar sound. In some ways it's a subtle thing, but in other ways they are worlds apart.

Is Steve your closer? Do you bring him in at the end to see it all out?Hmmm ... Yes and no. I think in this instance, it was more for the organic side of the record. He came in to work on that. At times, we had almost rival versions. We'd have a song like "The Blackout" where we almost had two versions of it. There would be a more organic version and then in a studio upstairs we had another version that was slightly more 21st century, slight more stripped down. We put the album together on a case-by-case basis. "Well, this one can be a little more organic because that one is a bit more processed and disciplined sonically." You probably noticed that the version of "You're the Best Thing About Me" that we released is quite different than the one we are playing live, and the final mix is like six weeks away.

How do you guys pick between songs? What is the process?The process is that we slowly sort of start to put the cornerstone songs in place and then we fill in around them and get clues about the overall identity of the record. For me, one of the breakthrough tune was "The Lights in Front of Me," which is now called "The Lights of Home." We had very rock & roll verses in it that sounded really great, but it was a little retro. We kind of knew it was in the running because we just loved it so much, and then Jacknife did a more stripped-down arrangement. The drums were sort of an open question, so Larry went in and played drums, so it had the discipline of a very contemporary production, but then with this amazing, very beautifully played human drum part on top of it. I think because it was recorded on its own it can kind of occupy the sound spectrum that it does. It still sounds really modern, but it almost sounds like it has a hip-hop influence or rather an R&B influence than a rock one. Anyway, those small little clues sometimes make you go, "OK, wow, that's the synthesis we're trying to achieve here."

In the case of "You're the Best Thing About Me," we were really excited about the mix we had six weeks ago. Then we started talking about how we were going to play it live and I went back to some early demos and found this one that had done at a point when we were experimenting with different arrangement ideas. It was an experiment we hadn't pursued and I thought, "This would be a good approach if we play it live," which we did on the Jimmy Fallon show. It's a fleshed-out approach with some new guitars.

Then Bono came into the studio to listen to it and was like, "OK, something is happening here. It's a better song now. I can't explain why, but I'm feeling something off this." So we kind of went off in a panic with us working furiously with two days to go before we had to turn the single in and get it to everybody for their consideration. We ended up agreeing that the simplicity, the rawness of it offers a counterbalance to the lyric and melody, which is very classic. It's a love song and it kind of takes it in a more convincing way. Somehow the song seems better - and it was totally last minute

The Edge to Replace Instruments for Musicians Affected by Hurricane Harvey

U2 guitarist began Music Rising after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The Edge announced he is raising funds to replace the instruments lost by musicians impacted Hurricane Harvey. The U2 guitarist began his charity Music Rising, in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina.

"You might recall that Edge – when Hurricane Katrina did its damage to New Orleans and destroyed the lives of so many musicians there – he put together Music Rising," The Edge's U2 bandmate, Bono, said in an interview with Boston radio station Mix 104.1.


"And it was a really clever way of getting the musicians of the area some instruments so they could continue to live."

Though exact plans for the recovery effort haven't solidified just yet, Bono noted that "Edge has been in discussions now to do the same [work] in Houston. And you know, we have private ways that we will respond, but publicly that's what we're doing."

Donations for those affected by Harvey can be made on the Music Rising website.




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Edge talks brand new U2!

In an extended chat, Edge discusses U2's new album 'Songs Of Experience'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05f95rg

Happy Birthday, The Edge!!!

The best of days for the Guitar Master!!!!!

Edge received the Les Paul Spirit Award

In private tent on the Bonnaroo grounds, The Edge received the Les Paul Foundation’s second annual Les Paul Spirit Award. It recognized his status as an innovative artist whose embrace of technology (like his signature “delay effect”) has taken him to new creative heights






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U2 at Jimmy Kimmel's

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More on U2's Q & A

Larry's first experience with the Foxtrot, how Adam once 'smelt Betty Dalton's perfume in a corridor' and financial advice for Edge from a country music legend: 'There's no money in rock...'

After the FaceBook Live Q&A earlier this month, the cameras kept rolling while the band took a few more questions, these ones just for U2.com subscribers.

Will The Daltons make their own 30th anniversary appearance? The song from another album that would fit on The Joshua Tree? Why the 1987 tour opened with a cover version - and what it was.

It's going to be some tour this summer. As Bono says, 'I've never sung The Joshua Tree before in sequence… it's quite a ride.'

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