// Soundbite

'We've always been political in an organic way. I thought actually this would be a more political album. I think Bono did, too. I'm amazed at how personal it is. It's not a manifesto. It's about what matters. It's an honest snapshot of where we're at.' -Edge

'It's just such a personal record. It may just be our best.' -Bono

'It's very much a guitar record, Vertigo, Love and Peace, City of Blinding Lights, All Because of You ­ all pretty up , rocky tunes. A lot of them are a kick-back to our very early days, so it's like with each year we have gathered a little bit more and this is what we are now.' -Adam

'It started out to be a rock 'n' roll album, pure and simple. We were very excited that Edge wasn't sitting at the piano or twiddling a piece of technology, because he is one of the great guitarists. Halfway through, we got bored, because it turns out you can only go so far with rifferama. We wanted more dimension. Now you've got punk rock starting points that go through Phil Spectorland, turn right at Tim Buckley, end up in alleyways and open onto other vistas and cityscapes and rooftops and skies. It's songwriting by accident, by a punk band that wants to play Bach.' -Bono

Produced by Steve Lillywhite.
Additional production: Chris Thomas, Jacknife Lee, Nellee Hooper, Flood, Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, Carl Glanville.

// Track By Track

With the album finally in the can, Edge, Bono and Adam offered an exclusive insight to U2.Com into how the different tracks came together - some took years, others seemed to come from nowhere in an evening. (Larry was travelling at the time of the interview for U2.Com, he'll be bringing site members up to date in future exclusive interviews!)

Vertigo

Bono
'Fear, paranoia, these are the type of things we wanted from 'Vertigo'. The album ends in quite an ecstatic place and, so we wanted to start off with a little bit of electric shock treatment. It's a club maybe, and you're supposed to be having the time of your life, but you want to kill yourself (laughs)….it's a light little ditty. These are nervous times, they really are, you turn on the news, you think 'Wow, who's next? My brother, my sister, my uncle, my aunt …nervous times.'

'It's a dizzy feeling, vertigo, a sort of sick feeling, when you get up to the top of something and there's only one way to go - that's not a dictionary definition, that's mine. And in my head I create a club, called Vertigo, with all these people in it, and the music is just not the music you want to hear, the people are not the people you want to be with. And then you just see somebody, she's got a cross round her neck, and you kind of focus on it because you can't focus on anything else, and you find a little, tiny, fragment of salvation there.'

Adam
'With 'Vertigo' we really wanted to have a vital, up, rock'n roll sort of track. We had been hearing that energy that had been coming off The Hives and The Strokes and The Vines and that had really connected with where we came from. I think Edge felt he could write and produce a riff that was even better than some of those.

'It sat around for a while and it was worked up as a song called 'Native Son' but was a bit third person in the delivery. In January we had a rewrite and it turned into 'Vertigo' which is so much more vital.

'It is harder and harder to get people's attention and if you don't try and grab their attention with a track that's indisputable, a track that really fires their imagination then they are not that interested in what the rest of the record is about.'

Edge
'U2 are not really a rock'n roll band, that's the truth, we've never really been a rock'n roll band. But with 'Vertigo' I was trying to come up with a sound and guitar riff which was unashamedly full-on rock'n roll, like the best of that form which I do love, whether The Pistols or The Stones, whether punk or the best of metal.

'So I worked up some music and for a while it had the title of 'Full Metal Jacket' and I had some melody ideas on the music but nothing else I was really happy with it.

'The demo I worked up from some drum loops of Larry which was really the bench mark for the tune for quite a while and we didn't really better it until the take that is on the album. That was one of those moments when everybody arrived and came together at the same moment - and it was immediately clear to everyone in the room that we had just hit the best take on that song that we had ever done. (When) Bono came up with some great new melody ideas we were pretty much there.

'It took a while though. We recorded 'Vertigo' in a couple of different ways, in fact there was a whole other song written over the music called 'Native Son' which we finished up, mixed and everything - it was really good but it didn't have what we thought this tune had which was the complete attitude. We abandoned 'Native Son' as perhaps a little too earnest in the end, I think that's where we went off it.'

Miracle Drug

Edge
'One of the exciting things about making this album, was that having worked on a lot of different material, having recorded it in various different ways over quite an extended period, as the album started to come into focus at the end, we all started to get a feel for not just the individual songs but the whole collection and how it was all fitting together. At that moment everybody just got so inspired that we wrote a bunch of songs in the last few months and one of them was 'Miracle Drug' which came quite quickly. It is a tune with a lot of resonance and will be one of those songs that will be played in U2 shows for a long time.'

Bono
'We all went to the same school and just as we were leaving, a fellow called Christopher Nolan arrived. He had been deprived of oxygen for two hours when he was born, so he was paraplegic but his mother believed he could understand what was going on and used to teach him at home. Eventually, they discovered a drug that allowed him to move one muscle in his neck, so they attached this unicorn device to his forehead and he learned to type. And out of him came all these poems that he'd been storing up in his head. Then he put out a collection called 'Dam-Burst of Dreams,' which won a load of awards and he went off to university and became a genius all because of a mother's love and a medical breakthrough.'

'But in a more oblique way (Miracle Drug) is probably as much about Aids and the drugs developed to arrest it. I couldn't write specifically about that without feeling an idiot.'

Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own

Bono
'I sang 'Sometimes You Can't Make it On Your Own' at my father's funeral. He was a very tough, old boot of a guy, Irish, Dub, north side of Dublin, very cynical about the world and the people in it, you know, but very charming, and funny with it.

'His whole thing was, 'Don't dream - to dream is to be disappointed'. That was really what I think was his advice to me. He didn't speak it in those words, but that's what he meant, and of course that's really a recipe for megalomania isn't it? I mean I was only ever interested in big ideas, and not so much dreaming but putting dreams into action, doing the things that you have in your head has become an important thing for me.

The song 'Sometimes You Cant Make it On Your Own', was dedicated to him, and, it's a portrait of him - he was a great singer, a tenor, a working class Dublin guy who listened to the opera and conducted the stereo with my mother's knitting needles. He just loved opera, so in the song, I hit one of those big tenor notes that he would have loved so much. I think he would have loved it, I hope so.'

Edge
'It's very hard when people refer to one of our old songs and say' Can you write another song as good as 'Where the Streets Have no Name' or 'One?' These are the kind of songs people refer to, but I think on this record, we may have a couple of songs which are equally as good, maybe even better. In some ways I am still too close to really say for sure if I even believe it myself - and in the end what I believe is not that important, it's what everyone else thinks that will decide if the songs on this record are as good as our best work, so I am happy to just see what people think.'

Love And Peace Or Else

Bono
'Love and Peace or Else' was started a few albums ago and we could never quite crack it. It was just like this spirit in the sky, this '60s psychedelic riff. Brian Eno was in the room, and with that low base sound, it just sounded like the end of the world and the subterranean base and this sort of glam rock, day-glo, gospel formality - 'Lay down, lay down your guns, all you daughters of Zion' - it's got a real T Rex groove to it and a Garry Glitter thing in there with a boom ba boom ba boom.

'Its got this nice picture in it which is 'as you enter this life, I pray you depart, with a wrinkled face and a brand new heart' this baby and soul person. And then there's a lover's row in the middle of it, so the middle of this stomping tune, about where we are in the world right now, there's a Brian Wilson-like turn left, and you're on a phone call, 'hi darling'. You're having a row with your girlfriend and you say, 'Look fine, we can figure this out, things are going to be ok…' And as you're talking, in the background there's a TV and 'the TV is turned on but the sound is turned down, and the troops on the ground are about to dig in, and I'm wondering where's the love, where's the love' .You have the personal and the political just come together (in a little) scene there, very cinematic.'

Adam
'Love and Peace' was a track we had had a lot of difficulty (in) getting its own identity when we were doing 'All That You Can't Leave Behind'.
What we were really inspired by was Brian's distorted bass keyboard at the beginning. And then Larry had this very kind of seventies sort of Glitter Band drumbeat - and we just thought, this has got to go somewhere, we've go to do something with this.

'We tried to finish it off for 'All That You Can't Leave Behind', but it never quite worked. Every time we listened to the out-takes it always stood out and so we came back to it on this record - and I think Edge came up with a killer guitar part which kind of glued it together and Bono more or less had the melody and the vocal mapped out. I think the middle eight was still intact, so once Edge had put that guitar part down the song was there.

Edge
'Love and Peace or Else' started out as this improvisation and it owes a lot to Brian Eno's incredible synthesizer sound which opens the song and Danny Lanois on shaker, working with Larry on drums. We had this fantastic groove and sound but really there was no song and it took a while to tease the song out of just the few bits of music that were part of that first version.

'We held on to that version because we knew there was something great about it and we just needed a song to set it off. We rewrote it a couple of times and it changed a lot but retained the best moments of that first improvisation because it was just a sound and an idea at that time. It has all those resonances of the glam era, like the best from the time of Eno I guess, and then on top of this you also have this kind of C21st sonic element, coming from way in the future.

'It's a great thing on any record to have something the like of which you have never heard before - and it's one of my favourites for that reason.'

City Of Blinding Lights

Bono
I think one of the most important moments for me on this album happened when I went to see Anton Corbin's exhibition. Anton has done all our album covers and has been a very close friend of the band, and one of the most important photographers in the world and truly a great, great, artist.

He had a museum show in Holland where he's from, and I went to see it and he hadn't told me but there was a room full of giant photographs of the band and a lot of me from when I was very young, and he put me in to the room and I was like 'Just get me out of here!'

And then I saw this photograph - I guess I would have been 20, 21 - getting into a helicopter, the first time I'd ever been in a helicopter, first or second video we made, and it was New Years Day, and we're just about to take off. And I saw this face, and the face was so open and so empty of complications and so the naivety was there and it was so powerful, and this Dutch journalist came up and said, 'Bono, what would you say now to this Bono back then, have you anything you would say?' And I was trying to think what I would say, and it kind of just came out of my mouth, I said, 'I'd tell him he's absolutely right, stop second guessing yourself.' Back then I didn't know how powerful that naivety was, I didn't know how powerful that innocence was so I was trying to rid myself from it, I was trying to set fire to myself, and get rid of this, become a more worldly person, become a man of the world, and of course the less you know, the more you know, sometimes the less you feel, and really understand.
So 'City of Blinding Lights' came right out of that moment for me, it's a story of innocence and experience and the chorus is set in one of the greatest moments for me ever on the stage when we were the first band to play New York City, after 9/11 and we turned on the lights, during one song and I just saw twenty thousand people, just their eyes wide open, and tears just rolling down their faces and it was an amazing moment for me, musically, and I just shouted out 'Oh you just look so beautiful tonight'. And so that's become this song.

All Because Of You

Adam
'All Because of You was another tricky one to get right and I'm still not sure we even ended up with the best version of it on the record. Again that was a great guitar riff that Edge had from the end of the last tour - we had done some recording in Monaco before we finished the tour - and it was always a straight ahead rock song. Again it went through a number of rewrites until we ended up with the version we have now, which is very acoustic heavy, kind of an early Kinksy feel. But I feel that live it will be a bit more band oriented and then come into its own.'

A Man And A Woman

Adam
'Jacknife Lee brought a freshness, he had never worked with us before. We kind of said, 'Look, go and do what you feel is right, don't have any preconceptions.' So he had a second studio set up, he would do keyboard things, pro-tools work with what we had already done.

He pretty much worked up 'A Man And A Woman' from its most basic stage which was really a demo that Bono and Edge had worked on in the south of France. Everyone really liked it in that demo form, no-one really wanted to change it, but he started to mess with it - he got me to put a bass on it, then changed it again and made it better, then I think Bono came in and did a bit of guitar, and the middle eight really developed. Edge put some keyboards on and a bit more guitar and gradually it really turned into the song that it is now. Bono finished writing the lyrics and did a vocal performance then Jacknife went off and mixed it. That song was pretty much his work.'

Crumbs From Your Table

Bono
'The work that I do in Africa is a different part of me really, than the songwriter or the performer, and yet I suppose it does shape the way I see the world. I try to keep them apart, but they often end up colliding. 'Crumbs From Your Table' is probably the most clear collision of those two worlds.

'I've described it as a lovers row, but I remember the feeling of knocking on doors and going and begging cap in hand, you know, to increase aid flows for the poorest of the poor and just thinking to myself 'Why are we… why am I… going and begging here? And I'm not going to feel nervous: I'm meeting these politicians, they should feel nervous, because they're going to be held accountable by God and by History'

'And I was kind of angry - angry at the Church as well because the Church was very slow to respond to the AIDS emergency, very judgmental about people with AIDS. (They have since changed their position and I'm very impressed, they're all starting to wake up and realise, that AIDS is leprosy, you know, just read your gospels, and figure it out.)

'But at the time I wrote the lyrics for that song, it was an anger, in me about that. 'I believe if I was able / Waiting for the crumbs from your table'. Everywhere in Africa there's Irish nuns and priests jumping out from behind bushes - it really is the truth! I was just finishing off the song and I got a call from this nun, Sister Ann, my mate in Malawi, and she was just something special. In Malawi she had seen people queuing up to die, three to a bed - two on top, one underneath. She rang while I was finishing the lyrics so I put her in the lyric so it's in the middle eight - 'Where you live should not decide / Whether you live or whether you die / Sister Ann, whether you live or whether you die/ Three in a bed, Sister Ann, she said, Dignity passes by'.

So now Sister Ann, this incredible Irish nun, is in a rock n' roll song on our new album, Its kind of funny - just because she called that day.'

One Step Closer

Edge
'One Step Closer started out as a chord sequence that I had. When we are jamming sometimes I will throw in something I have worked up somewhere to see what happens to it and in this case we were in a jam session and I started playing the chords and Bono came up with amazing melody and everyone jumped in and we had this great song.

'But it wasn't until we started deconstructing it with Jacknife Lee that we saw what a great song it could be. He was great, the way he mixed it. The song is a lot more now than it was when we first played it. It was actually almost Velvet Underground, a sort of traditional sound, but now it has this far more complex feeling about it and I think lyrically it is very personal to Bono.

'The idea for the song lyrically, the 'one step closer to knowing' line, came out of a conversation Bono was having with Noel Gallagher about his fathers illness, which was terminal, talking about how weird it was to know that your father is dying. And Bono was saying, 'I'm not sure if he has a faith as such, not sure he knows where he is going' and Noel says, 'Well he's one step closer to knowing isn't he ?' And it must have registered with Bono and two years later we came back to it when we were working on that tune and it came together really fast.'

Original Of The Species

Bono
'Original of the Species' is a very special song for me, it's a beautiful, melodic kind of journey. It's just (about) watching some people, as I have, be ashamed of their bodies and particularly teenagers with you know eating disorders and not feeling comfortable with themselves and their sexuality. And it's just saying to them, 'You are one of a kind, you're the first one of your kind, you're an original of the species, you feel like no one before, you steal right under my door, I kneel because I want you some more, I want a lot of what you've got and I want nothing of what you're not, everywhere you go, you shout it, you don't have to be shy about it…'

So its just this 'be who you are', kind of an anthem. I can't wait to play it live, and Edge plays some extraordinary piano, which has got the complexity to the verses to balance that anthem.'

Edge
The song was started on sessions for 'All That You Cant Leave Behind'. The first draft of the lyric was written quite quickly at the end of that project where Bono was inspired I think by a young woman who was going into being a teenager. But then he worked on it and there are other threads coming into the lyric. It is more general now, not quite so personal, and it has turned out from being a really good song, into a great song. I think it could be the song of the album.

'I remember the night we mixed it, there was just myself and Flood in the studio, it was after a day of different mixes and we finally got this mix and left with it in the car and I sat in the car for like an hour just playing it and playing it and playing it - I just couldn't' get over what we had done with it that night.

'Sometimes you get home and the next morning you put the latest mix on and you think, 'Where was my head at?' but the way it connected with me that night is the way it still does, it is very strong.'

Yahweh

Edge
It was one of those songs that had an emotional weight to it. Bono's first vocal to it was this incredible thing, and I think most of the melodies that ended up on the final version were written in a matter of minutes when he first heard the piece of music. Quite quickly after that, he came up with this idea of calling it Yahweh, which is the name for the most high, which Jewish people do not utter, it's written but not spoken. I don't know the exact translation, but it's a sacred name for God, and in this song it's a prayer. I can t really explain it beyond that, it's one of those songs that had to be written, and again we just got out of the way.

Bono
I had the idea that no one can own Jerusalem, but everybody wants to put flags on it. The title's an ancient name that's not meant to be spoken. I got around it by singing it. I hope I don t offend anyone.