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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U2's Adam Clayton Talks 'Experience' Tour, Possible Plans for 2019

U2 bassist Adam Clayton breaks down band's ongoing 'Experience' tour and reveals their possible plans for next year.

Months before they went into rehearsals for their 2018 Experience + Innocence Tour, U2 made a bold decision: Their new show wouldn’t feature a single song from The Joshua Tree, the 1987 classic that has been backbone of their live show for three decades. The band had spent the previous year playing the album – which includes "Where the Streets Have No Name and" "I Still Haven’t Found What I'm Looking For" – straight through in stadiums. "We drew a line in the sand," says bassist Adam Clayton. "If you really wanted those songs, we did it. It's done. We’re moving on here."

During a day off before beginning a two-night run at Chicago's United Center, Clayton called up Rolling Stone to explain the band's thought process behind the new set list, the possibility of the tour continuing into next year and what fans can expect from their SiriusXM show at New York's Apollo Theater.

What were the challenges you faced when putting together this new tour?

I think what was challenging for us was that the Innocence tour had been such an extraordinary success in terms of how it connected with people and how it changed the environment. The sound was really great, that screen was a real innovation and the stage running the length of the arena was an innovation. There were so many things that showed people there was a different way of doing things that all added up and reinforced the emotion of the journey. I think the audience had a very personalized, emotional response to it. It was a bit of a challenge figuring how where this one was going to land. We're in a very different era now and people are looking at the jeopardy and the risk in a different way.

You always planned this as a sequel to the Innocence tour, but when you didn't realize there would be a Joshua Tree tour when this all started. How did that tour change how you approach this one?

We knew we were going to leave those [Joshua Tree] songs to rest for a while. We're pretty much going to hold that line. We might waiver at some point if we feel that we're missing a color in the show, but at the moment we're holding the line. It's part of the difficulty with what this show is sort of becoming. We're 10 dates into it and we're trying to include as many as possible from the new record. There's still a couple of them we haven't really dug into, but we'd like to perform. "The Showman" is something we rehearsed up early on. We just managed to get "Red Flag Day" in, but we'd like to get "Landlady" in too. There's some other colors that we'd like to add, but we aren't there yet.

The show is kind of telling us what the resolve is and the resolve in many ways is that for us Experience is quite a simple thing and it's about acceptance of who you are and what you are and your strengths and your weaknesses. It's an internal discussion and an internal resolve, where Innocence is an exterior resolve in some ways.

That "line in the sand" about not doing Joshua Tree songs. Was that unanimous or was there debate about that?

I think we were all excited about the idea of not delving back to Joshua Tree. That's because Joshua Tree has cast such a big shadow over everything we've done. We felt that by doing that tour that we, to an extent, had laid that to rest for the moment. There will be another time to come back to that material, but I think we had always said when were doing those shows, "This material seems relevant to the time we are living in now. We're prepared to re-present it in a similar fashion, but with some production and let those songs speak and let the intent behind some of those songs play out."

I just don't know if you can do "Bullet the Blue Sky" in this new show. I think that ground is kind of already covered. I'm not sure about "With or Without You." You're the Best Thing About Me" is the current version of that sentiment.

I've heard Bono say a lot that he knows if a show isn't going well, "Where the Streets Have No Name" will always elevate the whole show. What's it like to walk onstage and know you don't have that big moment to fall back on?

You have to look at your strengths and your weaknesses. "Streets" is an amazing song to have in the canon, but if you threw that into this context I think the narrative would shift. Again, I think it would be such a big statement that it would reduce everything else. What we're doing in this show is we're trying to end on "City of Blinding Lights" and to make that a finale because that feels like a wholesome sentiment in this context. It's a song of innocence, to an extent. Bono always says, "That started out as an innocence song, but it has some gravitas." There's almost in terms of narrative within the song; there's a contemporary sort of "My Way" thread within that.

Talk about the decision to finally play "Acrobat." Did you do that in response to the fans that have been asking for so long?

There's this really annoying journalist who works at Rolling Stone ... [laughs] He's been saying "you've got to play 'Acrobat'" for years now. [Editor's note: Whoever might that be?] [laughs] "Acrobat" is a song that over the years felt somewhat midtempo in a show and we never really felt it was going to fit into any of the other contexts of shows that we've done. It was always the odd one out. This time around, it felt like a rarity and there has been a movement within the hardcore fan club for it. We've never shied away from doing particular songs unless it doesn't particularly contextualize what we're trying to do. I guess it has an emotional resonance to it and it has a lyrical through-line that works as well. I'm very happy to perform it. It's actually great fun. I would never have guessed that the right way to perform that is in a kind of dressed-down situation on the E stage.

On the Innocence tour, we had a very simple drum setup on the second stage. This time around, we have a full Larry drum kit, so we're able to perform to a different level of quality. "Acrobat" really fits into that. It's like being at a club gig.

It's in a strange time signature. Is it a difficult song to play?

It is a difficult song to play. It's an even more difficult song to move to. I think it's a 6/8 time. There's a couple of different options for how you count it. I think that sort of, intuitively, we've switched between those time signatures a bit, but because we're not schooled musicians we manage to get away with that. It is unusual, but it really, really works and there's some great guitar playing by Edge.

What drew you back to "Staring at the Sun?"

"Staring at the Sun" was always a bit of a personal favorite. It fits into this somewhat dark cloud that is sitting over the world at the moment. Again, in that context it's less of a hopeful pop song and more of a commentary on where we are.

When you show the KKK marching, it really reflects on this moment in time.

Yeah. I sort of think it's a little "Lord of the Rings" in Middle Earth. The forces of darkness are gathering around that. Staring at the sun and not waning to be involved and not wanting to take a position doesn't seem like a good option.

Then you go into "Pride" and show the footage of MLK and it's a more more hopeful moment.

I think that's around the corner. There's always an equal and opposite swing in any political time. How that will manifest itself is hard to see or predict at this point, but I think it will. The children's movement against the gun lobby and against these extraordinarily harmful school shootings that just seem insane, and yet the powers that be and the political will and the lobbyists seem to keep saying that the solution is more guns. In any situation, that's just not plausible. That movement at the moment seems hugely radical and fragile. Perhaps it'll play out over the next five or 10 years into something that really has some teeth and changes things.

Did you feel any anxiety before opening night because a certain percent of the audience might walk out upset they didn't hear their favorite hit?

I think if we hadn't done Joshua Tree we'd have felt like we needed to observe that for people, but I think having played Joshua Tree so successfully across the country our attitude was quite hard-lined. We would like people to pay attention to the last couple of albums because we feel they are very eloquent. We worked really hard for those songs. Bono's lyrics are, I think, among the best he's ever done. The melodies are really worked on. We put a lot of effort into those records and we think people should focus on them.

Will the tour keep going into 2019?

It's really hard to call that at this moment in time. It's always nice to have a successful tour and keep it going until you feel like you've gotten to everyone that wants to see it. I think nowadays with everything so compartmentalized it feels like we've got to get to our people. But I don't know. It is a short tour. We made that decision because we've done a lot of shows over the last four years in total. There are parts of the world we just haven't been to in the past for years as well. We haven't been to Australia, Japan, Southeast Asia. We really haven't spent that long in Europe, so perhaps we'll lengthen the tour, but in reality maybe we need to find a way of being in bigger places again. If there was a way of taking the essence of this period and being in stadiums, maybe that's worth thinking about. But I don't know. I'm just speculating here with you.

How is the app working from your perspective?

I'm kind of happy to say that actually people, although they're doing it, I think they're losing interest in it. Rather than having an experience through a phone, people are willing to be part of the real-world experience that's happening there and now. That's a good sign. I think what's really challenging is that you know in the past you knew when you were losing the audience because there would be a shift. Now you know you're losing the audience if people are checking their emails. It's really hard to compete with digital culture.

At my show, most people seemed to put their phones away after the first song.

That's really what you want. Going to a concert has to be an immersive experience. If you're in it for a couple of songs and then something happens and you go off and check your emails and you hear the babysitter has a problem or whatever, you're not in that "we're switching off, we're going to a concert" mood.

What's the Apollo Theater show going to be like?

That's going to be real old school. We're trying to look at songs we can do in a stripped-down production and musical setting. I think that'll be a real proper old-school theater show and I'm looking forward to it.

So the set list will be very different than what you're doing now?

Edge has got some radical ideas. We haven't resolved all of them, but yeah it will be. It'll be a different set.

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Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview

In 1985, shortly after U2 broke through in America, Rolling Stone named them the "band of the Eighties." Over the course of 30 years and 16 cover stories, the magazine has forged a deep relationship with U2. The band's new album, Songs of Experience, topped the charts in early December, meaning U2 now have a Number One album in each decade from the Eighties on.

I first interviewed Bono in 2005, when we talked for 10 hours over a long weekend in Cancún, Mexico, starting an intimate dialogue about rock & roll, social justice, faith and the purpose of art. This interview picks up where that one left off, although this time the stakes are much higher. The election of Donald Trump and a rising wave of fascism in Europe had rocked Bono, as had a near-death experience he suffered while making Songs of Experience. While he still finds it difficult to talk about his "extinction event," as he calls it, Bono opened up about its profound effect on both his life and on the new album.

We conducted the interview over two sessions at the kitchen table of my New York apartment, around the corner from Bono's own place in the city. In person, Bono is warm, engaging and thoughtful, even while discussing difficult subjects. What shines through as much as anything is his ambition, which burns as brightly as ever. U2 remain hungry – for new approaches to songwriting, for finding their place in the age of streaming, for a new tour planned for the spring. Bono continues to pour his energy into global causes, meeting with world leaders and working on behalf of his ONE Campaign, which fights extreme poverty. He is the rarest of rock stars – an artist and an activist in the same measure. As always, he remains an optimist – and one of rock's greatest talkers, full of wit and candor and poetry.

You just finished the Joshua Tree tour. Nostalgia is something U2 like to avoid, so what was it like going out and playing an old album every night?

The stance that we took was [to act] as if we had just put out The Joshua Tree the week before. So there were no old Super 8 films or anything to give the sense of that time. We felt that its strength was that it had meaning, maybe even more meaning now than it did then. That was the conceit, and it got better and better. We ended with four nights in Sao Paulo, in front of, I think, nearly 300,000 people, and it was quite the crescendo.

But if I am honest – and I probably should be in this interview – I haven't quite recovered from it. I gave myself to the singing in new ways, but there wasn't a lot of going out and discovering the places we were playing, the cities that we were playing, which I really love to do. Stepping inside the songs was more of an ordeal than I thought it would be. They are very demanding in terms of their emotional – what word am I looking for . . . forthrightness. And then we were preparing for Songs of Experience. All that promotion takes a lot more work than I remember, but if you believe in the songs, you have to defend and present them.

Songs of Experience just debuted at Number One on the albums chart, which means you've had a chart-topping album in every decade from the Eighties on. Why do you still push so hard for hits?

I mean, it's not for everybody – and it can't be for us all the time. But it just felt right. These last two albums mix up the personal and the political so that you don't know which one you're talking to. That's a kind of magic trick, and realizing that of course all the problems that we find in the exterior world are just manifestations of what we, you know, what we hold inside of us, in our interior worlds. The biggest fucker, the biggest asshole, the biggest, the most sexist we can be, the most selfish, mean, cunning, all those characters you are going to see them in the mirror. And that is where the job of transformation has to start first. Is that not what experience tells us?

How did you envision Songs of Experience in relation to Songs of Innocence, its companion album from 2014?

I had this idea of your younger self talking to your older self for quite a while. It is an interesting dramatic device. [Several years ago] I was at an exhibition of Anton Corbijn's photographs in Amsterdam, and someone asked me what would I say to this photo; I think it was a shot of me at age 22. I thought about it, and then I said, "Stop second-guessing yourself. You're right."

And then the person asked what the younger me would say to the older me. I got a bit nervous. I wasn't sure. I took that hesitation as a clue that maybe I wasn't comfortable with where I am now. I was starting to realize that I had lost some of that fierceness. Some of that clarity, that black-and-white point of view.

But now it seems like you're in another place entirely. It seems like you have more clarity, that you learned more.

I'm less unsure about taking political risks or social risks. When I became an activist, people were like, "Really?" But they eventually accepted that. Then I started to be interested in commerce and the machinery of what got people out of poverty and into prosperity. And then a few people said, "You can't really go there, can you?"

I said, "But if you are an artist, you must go there." You and I have had the conversation over the years: What can the artist do? What is the artist not allowed to do, and are there boundaries? Now, I would say to my younger self: "Experiment more and don't let people box you in. There is nothing you can't put on your canvas if it is part of your life." We have this idea in the culture that came out of the Sixties and Seventies, that artists were somehow above the fray, or should be above the fray.

That they have an excuse not to participate.

I had an excuse not to participate. But I knew that some people who have regular jobs are just as valuable as the artists, maybe more valuable. And there are more assholes per square inch amongst us artists. I remember meeting Björk, and she said that in Iceland, making a chair is a big deal. Like, a song is not more important than a chair. And I went, "Well, depending on the chair, Irish people know that to be true." So if that is true, then stop this nonsense that an artist is an elevated person.

One thing this record seems to be about is survival. The survival of the world, and of our political system. But let's talk about your own survival. In the middle of recording, you had a near-death experience. Tell me what happened.

Well, I mean, I don't want to.

I understand. I had my own experience recently. People want to ask about my health, and I'm hesitant to talk about it. Why do I feel that way? Am I ashamed? Is it weakness I am trying to cover up?

It's just a thing that . . . people have these extinction events in their lives; it could be psychological or it could be physical. And, yes, it was physical for me, but I think I have spared myself all that soap opera. Especially with this kind of celebrity obsession with the minutiae of peoples' lives – I have got out of that. I want to speak about the issue in a way that lets people fill in the blanks of what they have been through, you know?

It's one thing if you were talking about it in a place of record like Rolling Stone, but by the time it gets to your local tabloid it is just awful. It becomes the question that everyone is asking.

But let's talk about it in an elliptical sense. I mean, it's central to the album.

Yeah. This political apocalypse was going on in Europe and in America, and it found a perfect rhyme with what was going on in my own life. And I have had a hail of blows over the years. You get warning signs, and then you realize that you are not a tank, as [his wife] Ali says. Edge has this thing that he says about me, that I look upon my body as an inconvenience.

In 2000, you had a throat-cancer scare, right?

No, it was a check for it. One of the specialists wanted to biopsy, which would have risked my vocal cords – and it turned out OK.

A few years ago, I visited you in the hospital with your arm in some kind of George Washington Bridge structure.

After my bike accident, pretending it was a car crash.

It looked bad, and then the latest thing. That is a lot of brushes with death.

There is comic tragedy with a bike accident in Central Park – it is not exactly James Dean. But the thing that shook me was that I didn't remember it. That was the amnesia; I have no idea how it happened. That left me a little uneasy, but the other stuff has just finally nailed me. It was like, "Can you take a hint?"

You are making the album and then all of a sudden you had to deal with your health issue. How did it affect the album and your vision of it?

Well, strangely enough, mortality was going to be a subject anyway just because it is a subject not often covered. And you can't write Songs of Experience without writing about that. And I've had a couple of these shocks to the system, let's call them, in my life. Like my bike accident or my back injury. So it was always going to be the subject. I just didn't want to be such an expert in it.

I met this poet named Brendan Kennelly. I have known him for years; he is an unbelievable poet. And he said, "Bono, if you want to get to the place where the writing lives, imagine you're dead." There is no ego, there is no vanity, no worrying about who you will offend. That is great advice. I just didn't want to have to find out outside of a mental excursion. I didn't want to find out the hard way.

So how did the idea of mortality come into play?

Gavin Friday, one of my friends from Cedarwood Road [in Dublin], has written one of my favorite songs. It is called "The Last Song I'll Ever Sing," about this character in Dublin, back when we were growing up, called the Diceman, who died at 42, five years after he was diagnosed with HIV. I realized only recently that "Love Is All We Have Left" is my attempt to write that song.

Can you be more precise? Like, what songs do you think came directly out of your near-death moment?

It's not so much songs as . . .

The mood of it.

I think . . . I mean, how about this: "The Showman" – that is a light song, a fun song, and it became a really important song. Not surrendering to melancholy is the most important thing if you are going to fight your way out of whatever corner you are in. Self-pity? The Irish, we are fucking world-beaters on that level; it's our least-interesting national characteristic. And I never wanted to surrender to that, so punk rock, the tempo of some songs, suddenly became really important.

But the second verse is the key, and it has the best line in the album, which is this: "It is what it is, it is not what it seems/This screwed up stuff is the stuff of dreams/I got just enough low self-esteem to get me to where I want to go." I wish I could say it was mine, but it was Jimmy Iovine who said it. A friend of mine was slagging him off, and I said, "Oh, a little insecure there, Jimmy?" And Jimmy turned around and said, "I got just enough low self-esteem to get me where I want to go."

That sounds like a realistic appraisal of you and your bullshit.

Performers are very insecure people. Gavin Friday, his line to me years and years ago was "Insecurity is your best security for a performer." A performer needs to know what is going on in the room and feel the room, and you don't feel the room if you are normal, if you're whole. If you have any great sense of self, you wouldn't be that vulnerable to either the opinions of others or the love and the applause and the approval of others.

The whole event enriched the album, though – talk about an experience.

But isn't that great? I thought Experience would be more contemplative, and it has got that side, but the heart of the album is the spunk and the punk and the drive of it. There is a sort of youthfulness about it. A lot of the tempos are up. And it has some of the funniest lines, I think. "Dinosaur wonders why he still walks the Earth." I mean, I started that line about myself.

Being a dinosaur?

Yeah, of course, but then I started to think about it in terms of what is going on around the world. And I thought, "Gosh, democracy, the thing that I have grown up with all my life . . . that's what's really facing an extinction event."

In an interview that you and I did in 2005, you said this: "Our definition of art is breaking open the breastbone, for sure. Just open-heart surgery. I wish there were an easier way, but people want blood, and I am one of them."

Life and death and art . . . all of them bloody businesses.

How did your faith get you through all of this?

The person who wrote best about love in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul. He was a tough fucker. He is a superintellectual guy, but he is fierce and he has, of course, the Damascene experience. He goes off and lives as a tentmaker. He starts to preach, and he writes this ode to love, which everybody knows from his letter to the Corinthians: "Love is patient, love is kind. . . . Love bears all things, love believes all things" – you hear it at a lot of weddings. How do you write these things when you are at your lowest ebb? 'Cause I didn't. I didn't. I didn't deepen myself. I am looking to somebody like Paul, who was in prison and writing these love letters and thinking, "How does that happen? It is amazing."

Now, it doesn't cure him of all, of what he thinks of women or gay people or whatever else, but within his context he has an amazingly transcendent view of love. And I do believe that the darkness is where we learn to see. That is when we see ourselves clearer – when there is no light.

You asked me about my faith. I had a sense of suffocation. I am a singer, and everything I do comes from air. Stamina, it comes from air. And in this process, I felt I was suffocating. That was the most frightening thing that could happen to me because I am in pain. Ask Ali. She said I wouldn't notice if I had a knife sticking out of my back. I would be like, "Huh, what is that?" But this time last year, I felt very alone and very frightened and not able to speak and not able to even explain my fear because I was kind of . . .

When you felt like you were suffocating?

Yeah. But, you know, people have had so much worse to deal with, so that is another reason not to talk about it. You demean all the people who, you know, never made it through that or couldn't get health care!

Do you feel like you lucked out?

Lucked out? I am the fucking luckiest man on Earth. I didn't think that I had a fear of a fast exit. I thought it would be inconvenient 'cause I have a few albums to make and kids to see grow up and this beautiful woman and my friends and all of that. But I was not that guy. And then suddenly you are that guy. And you think, "I don't want to leave here. There's so much more to do." And I'm blessed. Grace and some really clever people got me through, and my faith is strong.

I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, "Why did this happen to me?" But there's honesty in that too. . . . And, of course, he looked like Elvis. If you look at Michelangelo's sculpture, don't you think David looks like Elvis?

He's a great beauty.

It is also annoying that he is the most famous Jew in the world and they gave him an uncircumcised . . . that's just crazy. But, anyway, he is a very attractive character. Dances naked in front of the troops. His wife is pissed off with him for doing so. You sense you might like him, but he does some terrible things as he wanders through four phases – servant, poet, warrior, king. Terrible things. He is quite a modern figure in terms of his contradictions. . . . Is this boring?

But if you go back to his early days, David is anointed by Samuel, the prophet Samuel, and, above all, his older brothers, a sheepherder presumably smelling of sheep shite, he is told, "Yeah, you are going to be the king of Israel." And everyone is laughing, like, "You got to be kidding – this kid?" But only a few years later, Saul, the king, is reported as having a demon and the only thing that will quiet the demon is music. . . . Makes sense to me. David can play the harp. As he is walking up to the palace, he must be thinking, "This is it! This is how it is going to happen." Even better, when he meets the king and gets to be friends with the king's son Jonathan. It's like, "Whoa, this is definitely going to happen! The old prophet Samuel was right." And then what happens? In a moment of demonic rage, Saul turns against him, tries to kill him with a spear, and he is, in fact, exiled. He is chased, and he hides out in a cave. And in the darkness of that cave, in the silence and the fear and probably the stink, he writes the first psalm.

And I wish that weren't true. I wish I didn't know enough about art to know that that is true. That sometimes you just have to be in that cave of despair. And if you're still awake . . . there is this very funny bit that comes next. So David, our hero, is hiding out in the cave, and Saul's army comes looking for him. Indeed, King Saul comes into the cave where David is hiding to . . . ah . . . use the facilities. I am not making this up – this is in the Holy Scriptures. David is sitting there, hiding. He could just kill the king, but he goes, "No, he is the anointed. I cannot touch him." He just clips off a piece of Saul's robe, and then Saul gets on his horse as they go off. They're down in the valley, and then David comes out and he goes, "Your king-ness, your Saul-ness, I was that close."

It is a beautiful story. I have thought about that all my life, because I knew that's where the blues were born.

Bono on How U2's 'Songs of Experience' Evolved, Taking on Donald Trump

I've always believed in working across the aisle ... but there's a bully on the bully pulpit and silence is not an option," says the U2 frontman


You started this album three years ago when the world was a very different place. How did the chaos of Brexit, Trump and everything else shape the eventual course of the album? Would it have been a very different album had those things not happened?

On the latter part of the question, it's hard to quantify but I would say the emotional temperature is up about 25 percent.

You've spent the past few months playing The Joshua Tree on tour as you put the finishing touches on the album. Has the tour impacted how you thought about Songs of Experience? How?

In truth, there's a couple of reasons why we delayed Songs of Experience. One personal, one political. The world around us was certainly changing out of all recognition, we nearly lost the European Union, something that has helped keep the peace in our region for nearly 70 years. Globalization replaced with localization is somewhat understandable, but the return of hard right views is not to be tolerated. If Marie La Pen had been elected president of France, the whole idea of a European Union would have been vulnerable.
You've had the same sort of disaffection in the United States with the rise of a new kind of constituency, people on the both left and right who have lost faith in political process, the body politic, in political institutions. These sentiments are easily played and manipulated by the likes of Donald Trump. In a world where people feel bullied by their circumstance, sometimes people fall prey to a bully of their own. Lots of people around me, both conservative and liberal, feel that this is one of those defining moments in their life and in the storied life of their country. After the election, some people on the left were almost grieving I'd say and when I try to understand this, I realized there was a kind of mourning, a mourning for innocence that was lost.
For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality and justice for all. The baseness of political debate, the jingoism, the atavistic fervor of Trump's verbiage reminded us that we were dreaming if we thought evolution applied to consciousness. Democracy is a blip in history and it requires a lot of focus and concentration to keep it intact.
"The Blackout," which started off its life about a more personal apocalypse, some events in my life that more than reminded me of my mortality but then segued into the political dystopia that we're heading towards now. "Dinosaur, wonders why it still walks the earth. A meteor promises it's not going to hurt" would have been a funny line about an aging rock star. It's a little less funny if we're talking about democracy and old certainties – like truth. The second verse "Statues fall, democracy is flat on its back, Jack. We had it all and what we had is not coming back, Zac. A big mouth says the people they don't want to be free for free. The blackout, is this an extinction event we see?" goes straight to the bigger picture of what's at stake in the world right now.
There's a song called "Get Out of Your Own Way" where I've tried to use some biting irony to reflect the anger out on the streets "Fight back, don't take it lying down you've got to bite back. The face of liberty is starting to crack, she had a plan until she got a smack in the mouth and it all went south like freedom. The slaves are looking for someone to lead 'em, the master's looking for someone to need him. The promised land is there for those who need it most and Lincoln's ghost says get out of your own way."

Many of your albums were made with either a single producer or the team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Why have you moved towards working with so many different producers on single albums?

Since The Joshua Tree, I don't think we've done an album with less than four producers. Though Flood is not credited as a producer on The Joshua Tree, his input was extraordinary. Achtung Baby, he was credited as a producer along with Eno, Lanois and [Steve] Lillywhite. Four producers seems to be the way for us, one for each member of the band. By the way, that's a joke. I think actually there's five on this one.

When we spoke a few months ago, you were critical of the production on 'Songs of Innocence,' saying it lacked "coherence," "should have been more raw" and that some of the songs worked better live. What did you do this time to make sure that didn't happen again?

Thomas Friedman in his book Thank You For Being Late speaks of how machines when they're put on pause cease productivity, but humans when they're put on pause begin a different kind of productivity. The pause on our album gave us a chance to play our songs live in the studio, strip them down to their bare essentials without any studio trickery to see what we really had. That was a great gift to the album even though in some cases we didn't want to run with the live feel, we learnt so much about the songs and that helped with cohesiveness.

On The Tonight Show you added lyrics to "Bullet the Blue Sky" that were unambiguously about Trump. Is that a sign you're going to become (even more) vocal about the dangers he poses to the world?

It is a little bit of a departure as I've always believed in working across the aisle as an anti-poverty activist but this isn't a matter of right or left. There's a bully on the bully pulpit and silence is not an option.

You've talked about how you want U2 to create joy in these insane times. Can you elaborate on that?

Unlike happiness, joy is one of the hardest human emotions to contrive for an artist but it is the mark of my favorite artists whether that be the Beatles, Prince, Beethoven, Oasis. It is life force itself. And I think something to do with the spilling over of gratitude for just being alive. Indeed as I think of it, Beethoven has his "Ode to Joy." The Supremes singing "Stop in the Name of Love" to me is one of the great anti-war songs. Although think it's about a lover's betrayal, the highness of the melody, the simplicity of the statement could be Ramones, could be Coldplay but I don't think there's anything more defiant than joy in difficult times. And the essence of romance is defiance. This is where rock & roll came in, this is what makes us useful. We must resist surrendering to melancholy for only the most special moments. That's a long way to say check our new single out, "You're the Best Thing About Me," it's kind of like punk Supremes.

What are the common themes that tie the songs on Songs of Experience together?

I try not to talk about William Blake too much because it sounds pretentious quoting such a literary giant but it was his great idea I pinched to compare the person we become through experience to the person who set out on the journey. If you're talking about innocence, you've probably already lost it but I do believe at the far end of experience, it's possible to recover it with wisdom. I'm not saying I have much of that but what little I have, I wanted to cram into these songs. I know U2 go into every album like it's their last one but even more this time I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt. So a lot of the songs are kind of letters, letters to Ali, letters to my sons and daughters, actually our sons and daughters.

There's a song called "The Showman" which is a letter to our audience, it's kind of about performers and how you shouldn't trust them too much. It's about me, haha. There's a funny line, well, I think it's funny anyway, "I lie for a living, I love to let on but you make it true when you sing along.?

It's like a Fifties Beatles-in-Hamburg type tune. There's a letter to America called "American Soul," Kendrick Lamar used a bit of this for "XXX" on his new album. And one that I didn't realize until too late that I was writing to myself, "It's the Little Things Give You Away." In all of these advice type songs, you are of course preaching what you need to hear. In that sense, they're all written to the singer. One other piece on Blake, I don't know if I'm explaining too much here but the best songs for me are often arguments with yourself or arguments with some other version of yourself. Even singing our song "One," which was half fiction, I've had this ongoing fight. In "Little Things," innocence challenges experience: "I saw you on the stairs, you didn't notice I was there, that's cause you were busy talking at me, not to me. You were high above the storm, a hurricane being born but this freedom just might cost you your liberty."

At the end of the song, experience breaks down and admits his deepest fears, having been called out on it by his younger, braver, bolder self. That same conversation also opens the album with a song called" Love Is All We Have Left." My favorite opening line to a U2 album: "There's nothing to stop this being the best day ever." In the second verse, innocence admonishes experience: "Now you're at the other end of the telescope, seven billion stars in her eyes, so many stars so many ways of seeing, hey, this is no time not to be alive." It's a chilling moment – in the chorus I was pretending to be Frank Sinatra singing on the moon, a sci-fi torch song "love, love is all we have left, a baby cries on the doorstep, love is all we have left." 

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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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Hear U2's Lustrous New Single 'You're the Best Thing About Me'

Band debuts official lead single from upcoming 'Songs of Experience' album

 U2 released "You're the Best Thing About Me," the gleaming lead single from their upcoming album Songs of Experience on Wednesday 6th September.

"You're the Best Thing About Me" is a joyous ear-worm about romantic dissatisfaction. Larry Mullen Jr. holds time with a firm, stuttering pattern on drums, and the Edge carries the chorus with pretty shards of melody from his guitar. High backing vocals echo many of Bono's lines, and the singer shows off his own falsetto during a gliding, multi-tracked bridge.


But underneath that appealing surface, Bono is playing the part of a malcontent. "I'll be crying out, how bad can a good time be?/ Shooting off my mouth, that's another great thing about me/ I have everything, but I feel like nothing at all," he sings. "You're the best thing about me," he admits, before adding, "the best things are easy to destroy."


"You're the Best Thing About Me" is the second song U2 have shared recently. The band released "The Blackout" last week.


Speaking with Rolling Stone about Songs of Experience in May, Bono said, "I thought it was done last year," but admitted that the extra time in the studio "has made [the album] better.""The problem is we have 15 songs and to get them down to 12," he continued. "We don't like long players. The actual track listing is not set yet, but we have some proper, proper fuck-off songs."


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Rolling Stone on 'The Blackout'

U2 unveiled "The Blackout," a dynamic new track from their upcoming album Songs of Experience on the band's Facebook page. The album follows 2014's Grammy-nominated album, Songs of Innocence.

"The Blackout" video was covertly filmed during the European leg of the Joshua Tree 2017 tour, U2gigs reports, at Amsterdam's Westerunie venue in late July. The allegorical lyrics about the destruction of the Earth and renewal appear to have political undertones, as Bono sings: "Dinosaur wonders why it still walks the Earth, yeah/ The meteor promises it's not gonna hurt" ... "When the lights go out/ In the darkness where we learn to see."

"The Blackout" is the first offering from Songs of Experience, which the band will detail in full on September 6th, the day that the official first single "You're the Best Thing About Me" arrives. U2 previously teased the impending arrival of "The Blackout" with cryptic mail the band sent to fans.

U2 also debuted new song "The Little Things That Give You Away," another track expected to feature on Songs of Experience, during their recent tour.

Bono recently told Rolling Stone of the difference between the band's last two LPs, "the theme of Innocence and Experience has a line from a song called 'Rejoice' which is 'I can't change the world, but I can change the world in me.' I wrote that at 22. That's the spirit of Innocence. But the spirit of Experience is actually I can change the world, I can't change the world in me."

The singer added in May that they were in the process of cutting down the album's tracklist from 15 songs to 12 and promised "we have some proper, proper fuck-off songs. 'Little Things That Give You Away' is one of them."

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Bono Talks 'Joshua Tree' Tour, Trump, Status of U2's Next Album

Until U2 kicked off their Joshua Tree 2017 Tour at Vancouver's BC Place stadium on May 12th, they honestly weren't sure they had a concept that would work. Here was a show built around an album that came out during the final years of the Ronald Reagan administration by a band that had spent their whole career refusing to cash in on their past. "It's so not us to throw ourselves a birthday party," says Bono. "We didn't know if we could pull off a tour that honors The Joshua Tree without it being nostalgic. That's an oxymoron."

But by the time Bono called into Rolling Stone three shows into the tour he had no doubt the group had a winning formula, one that took The Joshua Tree out of 1987 and firmly planted in in 2017. We spoke to the U2 frontman about how the band got to that place, and where he hopes they go from here.

Where are you calling from?I'm in sunny Los Angeles, which for an Irish fellow is always a bit of a thrill.

How were the first three shows for you?Oh, my goodness. ... I would say that we didn't know until Vancouver that the concept, or the script, would connect. That was a relief. Personally, I had some technical difficulties with my in-ear monitors. I was finding it hard to pitch. I've listened back and I did a pretty good job in pitch terms, but it was hard for me to enjoy the show since I had to concentrate so hard. So I was really relieved when I walked out and the rest of the band and everyone else was like, "Wow, that was great."

So I really enjoyed Seattle. I knew it wasn't just a concept. There was some connection with the audience, that's the difference. I just felt I had to give myself to this. It's all very well going back to where you started in terms of not using IMAG [screens]. That's the way we became the band that wrote The Joshua Tree. It's great to play like that, but it's hard for some people since they're used to IMAG. I just felt, "Can't we just concentrate on the music?" People weren't taking out their phones, which was amazing. I was just listening, so I really have to make the singing be the connective tissue, from my point of view. There's no images available, so it's like Shea Stadium; you're just these four dots at the start of the show. Then, presto, just add water and you become giants.

It's nice being ants for a few songs since you've just got to focus on the music since there's nowhere else to look. So I'm really enjoying that and also getting the crowd to be this choral response. That happened in Seattle. I was very grateful for that. 

Tell me why you wanted to do this tour.At first, it was just to honor this album that meant so much to us. It wasn't any grand concept. It was, "Shouldn't we do something? What can we do that would be special?" Then we came up with some of the idea and the thing just ran away with itself and the more relevant we realized it was. I know from reading reviews and hearing from people we've done it without being nostalgic. It's like the album has just come out. Nobody is talking about it as an historical thing. People are talking about its relevance now.

When you were brainstorming the tour, what ways did you come up with to fight the nostalgia?The high-tech aspect, finding this high-def 8[K]; it's like a three-dimensional image. I can't believe the Joshua tree is not there. You can touch it. We wanted to be very, very high tech. Then we commissioned Anton [Corbijn] to do that. We felt, "Can we just, again, play the songs without [images of us on the] IMAG?" We were calling it "punk floyd" for a while. Then the punk in us felt, "No, no, we need to see the band at some point." We entered at "Bullet the Blue Sky," that was very exciting.

Then we got very excited about the third act, as we call it. The first act is songs that got us to The Joshua Tree. The third act was, "Can we go into the future and what would the future sound like and feel like?" Then somebody said, and it might have been me, the future is about women. I really believe that, so let's make it an ode to women. As you know, feminine spirit is crucial at times when the male hegemony is causing mayhem. After the Second World War, people like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, whoever ... Marvin Gaye, say – that's a feminine spirit. The 1960s was a feminine spirit, and the 1960s was born in the rubble of the Second World War.

Great leaps forward of consciousness have a feminine spirit. Men start to look like [women], they grow their hair long. It's a funny thing, the Renaissance. ... Whenever you see the feminine spirit there's usually a jump in consciousness. In the One Campaign we're leading with, "Poverty is sexist." It's a campaign run by women. And I'm just watching, stepping back, to be the kind of town crier that I used to be. I'm still banging on drums, but I'm in the background. The singers are women. I'm amazed by it.

We had this idea as an ode to women. Then we got this idea of, "What if we got to know a woman, a girl, in a refugee camp?" The sort of women that aren't welcome, that President Trump doesn't want in America, in the country that brought us the great lines of Emma Lazarus at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Let's meet one such immigrant who he wants to turn away from the shore. I commissioned french artist J.R. He didn't have much time to do it. Where are we going to find this girl?

He finds her in Zaatari in a camp in Jordan, which i visited with my daughter and [my wife] Ali a year ago. He finds this incredible spirit, Omaima. She talks about America as a dreamland. She closes her eyes and J.R. asks her in another segment of the film we don't broadcast, "What do you see when you think of America?" She goes, "Oh, it is a civilized country and they are a good people." It was just heartbreaking. We've put some of that in that show, just for a kick in the balls. Just when you think things are lightning up, we do the ode to women. The next thing you know this woman gives you a kick in the balls, but in the most velvet way. She says everything. Sometimes when we're playing it I have to turn away from the film. I can't sing when we're looking at it. It's very touching. She's so dignified and so authoritative. There's something of a future leader in her.

I spoke to the Edge for a second after the show. He told me the set list was changing a lot in the final days before the first show. What was moving around?Not the middle of it, since we can't move that around – the denouement at the end of it. I don't know if you think it's too long; I think in the shows you saw, it goes from "One" into "Miss Sarajevo" into "The Little Things Give You Away." Normally we wouldn't allow such a denouement. It's a long thing to do, but we felt because it's so musical that we could get away with it. That was moving around before we made the set list. I may still move it around. We're looking at that now.

You dropped "MLK" and brought in "Bad."Yeah, because "MLK" was using up some of the space that "Streets" occupies. It was nice and elegiac, and we don't need to be at that point. I still wonder if there's too many songs at the start for people on the floor that can't see us. I know it's great for people up high that can see us. [Note: The band has since cut "A Sort of Homecoming" and moved "Bad" to the third act.]

I imagine you're purposely playing the songs in the sequence they came out, right?That was intentional, yeah. We felt we've done Boy on [the 2015] Innocence and Experience [tour] and October. We did "Gloria." We did "October." Actually the theme of Innocence and Experience has a line from a song called "Rejoice" which is "I can't change the world, but I can change the world in me." I wrote that at 22. That's the spirit of Innocence. But the spirit of Experience is actually I can change the world, I can't change the world in me. That is the actual, dare I say it, dialectic of Innocence and Experience. And when we come back to that tour as the Experience and Innocence tour, that's the theme. I felt we've done that. That was just to say that October, we covered.

I'm very pleased with the opening act. There hasn't been any complaints with the lack of IMAG, which is very nice since it means people are listening.

The Joshua Tree portion of the show, did you ever think about not playing it completely in sequence?I was a bit worried about that. I thought the density could play a role in us getting bogged down in the second half, but I felt the new arrangement of "Red Hill Mining Town," which is just magic, gives it space and "Running to Stand Still" gives it space. We wouldn't have done it if it didn't work. 

Prior to this tour, did you see Roger Waters play The Wall? Did you see Springsteen play The River? Have you gone to any of these album shows?I saw Roger Waters doing The Wall, missed Bruce, and mourned the missing of Patti Smith doing Horses, which was such a formative album for us. It's not an original idea. I saw Bowie do Low.

How did it feel to play "Exit" again?I had a lot of self-harm over the years playing that song. I was very glad not to play it for many years. I broke my shoulder. I got into some very dark places on the stage. I'd rather not step back into that song, but I found a way by thinking of where it came from and going back to the books I was reading at the time. I realized the real influence was probably Flannery O'Connor, so I developed this character called the Shadow Man and I'm managing to step into the shoes of the Shadow Man without any self-harm. It's quite a character. I'm actually using some lines from [the O'Connor book] Wise Blood. I also do "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe," which we grew up with in Europe, a totally racist thing. The bit from Wise Blood is, "Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going is never there. Where you are is no good unless you can get away from it." It's Southern Gothic, which is what I guess you'd call it.

In "New Year's Day" you sang the "Gold is the reason for the wars we wage" line for the first time. There weren't a lot of snippets of cover songs. You seem to be sticking to the album versions of the songs.I put "oil" in, actually. I said, "So we're told this is the golden age/But oil is the reason for the wars we wage." By the way, part of the fun of doing these shows is I'm changing the lyrics when I want to and I'm sticking to, as you point out, the arrangements on the albums. But I was in a band early on in the 1980s where the lyrics where not really the priority, strangely. It was, "What's the song about? What's the tune? What's the beat?" And you had people like Brian Eno who was, like, sort of anti the concept of the old-school lyric. He was saying, "Just look at these beautiful sonic paintings you're doing with your voice. Why do you need words? Just sing like that."

On Unforgettable Fire we left "Elvis Presley and America" like that, but some of the other songs were not finished, so "Bad" or whatever is not finished. Even "Where the Streets Have No Name" isn't finished, but why would you touch it? As a lyric it's a sketch. And so I'm really enjoying changing the odd lyric. "I first saw her face high on a desert plane." That's a beautiful change. In "New Year's Day" I sing, "It's true, it's true, the people break through." Little tiny little things that keep me close to the songs.

During "Bullet the Blue Sky" the fans were expecting a similar speech to the one you made at the Dreamforce show last year, but you didn't really go there.I think the peace film is the way to speak about Trump. I also think it's very, very important that people who voted for Donald Trump feel welcome at our show. I think they have been hoodwinked, but I understand and I would not dismiss the reasons why some people voted for him. I think people on the left really need to put their ear closer to the ground. I do this thing where I say, "The party of Lincoln, the party of Kennedy and those in between holding on, those letting go of the American Dream are welcome." This is the most important line: "We'll find common ground by reaching for higher ground."

I think that's important that people feel that. And then, because a lot of my friends, and maybe yours, after the election and Brexit there's this grieving, this melodramatic word, but the people feel like they are grieving. I was like, "What is it that people are grieving for?" I started to think it's their innocence. There's a loss of innocence. We're activists, but ever since I was born, and you're younger than me, the world was getting better every day. When you woke up, even if you did nothing, the world got better. Those of us who worked in the One Campaign we could point to people on AIDS drugs or people getting vaccinated, infant mortality rates coming down.

There were reasons to be optimistic. When I was in my twenties the Berlin Wall came down, Mandela gets free. You just think that this world is somehow just moving in the right direction, like almost it's evolution, the human spirit is evolving. It turns out that's not true. These things have to be brought into being. There are white papers going around the White House with 47 percent cuts to aid programs that keep babies alive, vaccinations. It's shocking, but it's real.

My thing in the middle of the show is to say, "OK, the dream, maybe it's time to wake up into it." Maybe the dream is telling us to wake up and Dr. King's dream is telling us to wake up. It's OK to realize it's going to be difficult, but we can do things. We are full of ingenuity. The world can be a much better place, but don't think it will be on its own. That's the thing.

To switch gears, are you still unable to play guitar?Yeah. I can play sitting down if the neck is pointing up in the air, and I can play with three fingers standing up. Dallas Schoo, Edge's guitar tech, is encouraging me to pick up slide guitar.

Do you miss playing it during the show? The band certainly doesn't miss it. They don't have much time for my guitar playing. I can play at home, but it just looks awkward. I don't think it's a necessity.

Can you talk a bit about the choice to end the show with a brand-new song?The only way we could do this tour was to play a new song. Times were right to do this tour. It was the right album and we did it, but in the end I couldn't go all the way without playing a new song. I wanted to start playing more new songs, is what I want.

What's the status of Songs of Experience?The band will tell you not to listen to me on those kind of matters since I thought it was done last year. But I think the pause has made it better. I will give them that. But if you left it to Edge he'd still be remixing it next year. But we have these songs. The problem is we have 15 songs and to get them down to 12. We don't like long players. The actual track listing is not set yet, but we have some proper, proper fuck-off songs. "Little Things That Give You Away" is one of them.

Steve Lillywhite was brought back to finish it off?We wanted to play live to really get it to cohere. Songs of Innocence, the songs are very special, I'm very proud of the songs, but if there's one thing I would criticize it for, it's the coherence in production. A friend of mine said to me, "Songs of Innocence? It doesn't sound innocent enough. It should have been more raw." So we didn't want to go in and make that mistake again, so we went in and played the songs again. Steve is the best guy for recording us in the studio with the band playing live, so that's what happened.

You're thinking early 2018 if you had to guess?I'd like it before then, but don't listen to me.

Then the plan is to do the Songs of Experience tour with the same staging?Yeah, the Experience and Innocence tour. It'll invert a lot of things, but it's got the same basics. We've got some incredible staging ideas, but it's basically the same language as the last tour.

Do you see any chance of an Achtung Baby tour in 2021?[Laughs] I haven't thought about it, but then again if you'd asked me five years ago about a Joshua Tree one I would have laughed at you. It would have to be called Zoo.Com.

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