Get on your Boots Official Radio Debut

"Get On Your Boots" will be world premiered by Dave Fanning on 2FM on Colm and Jim Jim's morning show on Dublin's 2FM on Monday just after the 8 a.m. news.

While 2FM does stream live online, when "Vertigo" was premiered, 2FM's live stream was cut for the premiere.Hope this does not happen again.

The radio can be tuned worldwide here:

www.2fm.ie/2fm/

source:http://www.atu2.com/

U2 Tour: A Feat of Genius

I guess we´d have to calm down with all the news about U2 in 2009 or we fans won´t be able to cope with the anxiety.

www.pr-inside.com has published that U2's new tour will be a "feat of genius". The Irish rockers have been secretly creating a technologically-advanced stage set for when they hit the road later this year, and have promised fans something spectacular. Frontman Bonosaid: "It's fair to say what we've planned for our outdoor shows has never been done before and that we've been working on it for a long time. "It's a feat of engineering genius." Before they go on their proposed tour, U2 will debut their new single 'Get On Your Boots' - taken from their upcoming album 'No Line On The Horizon' - at this year's BRIT Awards on February 18. Ged Doherty, Chairman of the BRITs committee, said: "We're thrilled to confirm U2 have chosen the BRITs for their first global TV performance of their new single." The band has not yet announced any live dates. The group's new album is to be released worldwide in March.

If this is true, get on your boots to walk the U2 road in 2009!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It´s in the Drums!!!!

According to www.atu2blog.com, Barely Larrry, the drummer for Zoo Station,in addition to being the Hit Man for San Francisco’s resident U2 tribute band, he works at a radio station in The City. and he was invited into a meeting with Universal today, who premiered the new U2 song for the station. S. This is what he had to say about it:

"God bless ‘em, it opens with a drum fill, not unlike “Young Folks” by Peter, Bjorn & John, and then we’re on our way. The signature riff is muscular and catchy in the “Vertigo” vein, with a rapid fire vocal pattern. I read Alan Cross’s blog this morning and he compared the verses to “Pump It Up” by Elvis Costello. I can’t say I disagree with that. It’s evocative, but I wouldn’t call it a rip-off. The chorus takes a trip through the Middle East with Bono singing, “You don’t know how beautiful you are.” There’s a half-tempo breakdown/bridge with a processed drum loop that I cannot wait to hear in a stadium. It’s like John Bonham playing on a Massive Attack song before the song lurches back into the main riff for another verse and chorus. And then before you know it, it’s all over. It feels like a seven minute epic crammed into about three minutes, although I didn’t check my watch for the time.

The single most striking thing about this song for me are the drums. Or at least I think they’re drums. I’ve never heard so many layers of rhythm on a U2 song. There are a lot of very processed drums (I thought of Kasabian at one point and N*E*R*D* at another) and loops going on, coming in and out of the mix and then at points it goes back to traditional sounding drums for emphasis. It’s extremely tasteful, but complex enough to make my head spin. And I have no idea how I’m gonna manage to pull it off when my band learns it, so stay tuned for some comedy while I work that business out.

Anyway, this is NOT U2 by the numbers. This is not a “return to form” or “back to basics.” This is, what the kids like to call, some OTHER s**t. And I loved it. I think you will too. And I can’t wait to hear it again."

OMG!!! With all the pieces of news we are gathering waitng for 19th is becoming an ardous journey!!!

source:www.atu2blog.com

WE ARE ONE: THE OBAMA INAUGURAL CELEBRATION AT THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL

U2 join a stellar line up of artists at The Lincoln Memorial in Washington this Sunday for 'We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration'. Don't miss it. It's open to the public and aired on HBO.


Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, John Legend, Usher, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen, will.i.am, and Stevie Wonder are among the acts performing while Jamie Foxx, Martin Luther King III, Queen Latifah and Denzel Washington are among those reading historical passages.

'We Are One:The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial' is the opening celebration for the 56th Presidential Inaugural, presented by HBO this Sunday, January 18 (7:00-9:00 p.m. ET/PT).

source: www.U2.com

The Brit Awards Ceremony Will Wear New Boots

U2's first single in nearly five years will be unveiled at the Brit awards ceremony in February, it has been confirmed.

Get On Your Boots comes from the Irish stars' upcoming album No Line on the Horizon, due for release on March 2nd.

The album is the first release by Bono and company since How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb in 2004, which claimed eight Grammy awards.

And to mark their return, the With Or Without You stars will take to the stage at London's Earl Court on February 18th for the 2009 Brit awards.

"Their addition to this year's show makes it possibly the best we have ever had," said Brits committee chairman Ged Doherty.

The Pet Shop Boys are also to perform at the ceremony, having been confirmed as this year's recipients of the outstanding contribution to music prize.

Singer-songwriter Florence and the Machine - who last week finished third in the BBC's Sound of 2009 list - will collect the Critics' Choice prize.

The 2009 Brit awards will be broadcast live on ITV1.

source:www.contactmusic.com/news

More Snippets from the New Album

">In his January issue, Rolling Stone magazine shows us more of the recording of "No Line on the Horizon".

In the studio as the band wraps the ambitious new 'No Line on the Horizon'

Even from the bottom of the stairway leading up to the control room, the huge sound leaking out is unmistakable: On this early- December evening in London's Olympic Studios, a new U2 song is being born.

Upstairs, on a green couch at the rear of the room, there's Bono, singing his latest attempt at a lead vocal at the top of his lungs. He rocks back and forth on the couch, as if in epileptic prayer, while he chants the lyrics into a handheld microphone. The words, which he keeps revising, have an almost hip-hop-like cadence: "Stand up, 'cause you can't sit down... Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady... Come on, you people, stand up for your love." The track is powered by a heavy riff that lands between the Beatles' "Come Together" and Led Zep's "Heartbreaker"; the groove is slinkier than anything U2 have done in years.

Bono's hair is cropped into a punky buzz cut. He's wearing jeans, worn brown cowboy boots, a black denim shirt — and even in this dim and private setting, his orange-tinted shades. Surrounding him are his bandmates, who have long since finished their parts: the Edge sits next to Bono, eyes closed, absorbing the music; Larry Mullen Jr. plays the occasional air-drum fill nearby; and Adam Clayton stands in a far corner. "We haven't quite gotten this right, and I'm the problem," Bono says of the tune, which is called "Stand Up Comedy" — at least for the moment. Tomorrow it will have new lyrics.

The new album, No Line on the Horizon (due out March 3rd), mixes some of the loudest and fastest tunes U2 have ever recorded with songs that reclaim the experimental spirit of their Achtung Baby-to-Pop Nineties run. There are pop songs, too, as well as at least one familiarly chiming U2 anthem, "Magnificent." But after two years, U2 still aren't quite finished. "We're at the point where half the album is done, and half the album is in a state where anything can happen — and probably will," says the Edge as he offers a tour of the studio's vast live room, which looks much the same as when the Stones recorded "Sympathy for the Devil" there. In the basement, longtime co-producer Brian Eno is revamping various songs with his laptop, while Steve Lillywhite helms the main board upstairs. The band's other producer, Daniel Lanois, left the day before.

The first single is likely to be "Get On Your Boots," a song that picks up where "Vertigo" left off, with a furry monster of a fuzz-guitar riff; power chords that, per Bono, echo the Damned's "New Rose"; verses that share a rhythm with "Subterranean Homesick Blues"; and a chorus that mixes whimsy and ardor: "Get on your boots/Sexy boots/You don't know how beautiful you are." "A hundred fifty beats per minute, three minutes, the fastest song we've ever played," Bono says, playing the tune at deafening volume in an airy studio lounge after dinner. "We're not really ready for adult-contemporary just yet."

The Edge spent time in the past year hanging out and jamming with Jack White and Jimmy Page for the documentary It Might Get Loud, and something seems to have rubbed off: "He's developing a third testicle, that's what is happening to the Edge," Bono theorizes. "I just hope it's not catching." Some of the songs began as solo GarageBand demos by the Edge, but others developed as full-band improvisations (often sparked by moody loops introduced by Eno) during sessions in Dublin, the South of France and Fez, Morocco — with Eno and Lanois playing keyboards and guitar, respectively.

"We start simple, we get complicated, and then we re-simplify it," says Eno, as he tweaks on his computer what he estimates to be the 80th incarnation of a song called "Breathe." "It's been a longer process, but I think it's compositionally stronger than anything they've done for a long time." That said, Eno is irked that the band has dropped some of the more contemplative and sonically adventurous songs it developed. "Tell them they're being stupid cunts," he jokes, after playing a lovely discarded ballad called "Winter."

Still, there are plenty of unexpected sounds. One concept for the album was a division between "daylight" songs — with organic instruments and arrangements — and "after-dark" songs. On the latter, Bono says, "we allow our interest in electronic music, in Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk, to come out." Among those songs is the title track, which has a churning, tribal groove and a deadpan chorus, and the ambitious possible album opener "Tripoli," which violently lurches between different sections. And then there's the astonishing seven-minute "Moment of Surrender," which merges a Joshua Tree-style gospel feel with a hypnotically loping bass line and a syncopated beat.

"Moment" was played just one time — the band improvised the version on the album from thin air. "This kind of spirit blows through every now and then," Bono says. "It's a very strange feeling. We're waiting for God to walk into the room — and God, it turns out, is very unreliable. So you don't have the right to imagine you can make a great album. But what you can do is create the conditions where it might happen."

MEN AT WORK

Bono writes for the New York Times

The prestigious American newspaper announced that Bono will write the "Op-Ed Guest Column".Here is his first reflection...

Notes From the Chairman by Bono

Published: January 9, 2009

Once upon a couple of weeks ago ...
I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Interesting mood. The new Irish money has been gambled and lost; the Celtic Tiger’s tail is between its legs as builders and bankers laugh uneasy and hard at the last year, and swallow uneasy and hard at the new. There’s a voice on the speakers that wakes everyone out of the moment: it’s Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” His ode to defiance is four decades old this year and everyone sings along for a lifetime of reasons. I am struck by the one quality his voice lacks: Sentimentality.
Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability.

A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.”

That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.”

Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.

As the year rolls over (and with it many carousers), the emotion in the room tussles between hope and fear, expectation and trepidation. Wherever you end up, his voice takes you by the hand.

Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.

We had spent some time in his house in Palm Springs, which was a thrill — looking out onto the desert and hills, no gingham for miles. Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis. And plenty of talk of jazz. That’s when he showed me the painting. I was thinking the circles were like the diameter of a horn, the bell of a trumpet, so I said so.

“The painting is called ‘Jazz’ and you can have it.”

I said I had heard he was one of Miles Davis’s biggest influences.

Little pithy replies:

“I don’t usually hang with men who wear earrings.”

“Miles Davis never wasted a note, kid — or a word on a fool.”

“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.

If you want to hear the least sentimental voice in the history of pop music finally crack, though —shhhh — find the version of Frank’s ode to insomnia, “One for My Baby (and One More for theRoad),” hidden on “Duets.” Listen through to the end and you will hear the great man break as he truly sobs on the line, “It’s a long, long, long road.” I kid you not.

Like Bob Dylan’s, Nina Simone’s, Pavarotti’s, Sinatra’s voice is improved by age, by years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels. As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story, of course.

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.

Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.

In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

This is our moment. What do we hear?

In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.



source:www.nytimes.com