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I am dreaming. I am in a scene from some movie where the life is draining out of the actor in the lead role. In the last moments of his life he is vexed and questioning his great love. “Why are you going? Don’t leave me!” “I’m right here,” his lover reminds him. “I haven’t moved.” “What? It’s not you leaving? Am I the one walking away? Why am I walking away? I don’t want to leave you. Please, don’t let me leave.”
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Success as an outworking of dysfunction, an excuse for obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Success as a reward for really, really hard work, which may be obscuring some kind of neurosis.
Air is not the will to conquer whatever Everest you will encounter in your life, but it is the ability to endure the climb.
What’s on offer is our band as a chemistry set, a chemical reaction between our audience and us. That’s what makes a good band great.
A job is a thing where you do something you don’t really like for eight hours a day for five or six days a week in return for money to help you do the stuff on the weekend you want to do all the time.
I treasure the mystery of every cosmic rhyme and took this for some comfort that I was doing the right thing. Free yourself to be yourself If only you could see yourself.
Hold me close, hold me close and don’t let me go. Hold me close like I’m someone that you might know Hold me close the darkness just lets us see Who we are I’ve got your light inside of me.
I was born with melodies in my head, and I was looking for a way to hear them in the world.
Once we are born, we begin to forget The very reason we came
At fifteen he was in the newspapers for shooting an intruder who’d broken into the bicycle store he was minding. By twenty he was a heroin addict, sleeping rough on the streets of London. I wrote our song “Bad” about Andrew.
The Dalai Lama says you can only begin a real meditation on life with a meditation on death. Gothic stuff but something in it. Finiteness and infiniteness are the two poles of the human experience. Everything we do, think, feel, imagine, discuss is framed by the notion of whether our death is the end or the beginning of something else. It takes great faith to have no faith. Great strength of character to resist the ancient texts that suggest an afterlife. At age fourteen, none of this was abstract.
Sometimes, goes the old spiritual, I feel like a motherless child. What is it about the loss of a mother? Does something inside the child feel that the mother chose to leave? Abandonment is probably the root of paranoia. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bob Geldof, John Lydon, so many rock ’n’ roll singers lost their mothers at an early age. There must be something to this. A friend tells me of a parallel abandonment in hip-hop. Abandonment by the father drives that car.
Norman was upbeat by nature, except when the melancholy had him. Then it really had him.
A creature of his time, he was not that interested in his kids and now he was the only parent, and he didn’t like it.
Isn’t it true that we turn the world into the shape of our pain?
To this day we debate for hours why I think progressive rock was a bad thing.
Edge is a minimalist by nature. I am not. I am a maximalist. Edge has a poker face. I do not.
Edge is the silence inside every noise. He’s the light inside the paint.
It is not an exaggeration to say U2 began to write our own songs because we couldn’t play other people’s.
A boy tries hard to be a man His mother lets go of his hand The gift of grief Will bring a voice to life.
The truth is that the enduring appeal of that song is truly not as nihilistic as a suicide note. In its sound or its state of mind it’s a song about a mother’s love. A song about unconditional love. Agape love. Eternal love. More usually described as a mother’s than a father’s.
At the right time a stranger or a friend or even the physical landscape we need will find us. But not always do we discover their role.
If you’re where you should be, you’ll meet whom you need to meet.
On all the journeys I’ve taken, I’ve sought a guide. Even with the compass of faith I’m looking for the right company for the ride. For some spirit guide physicalized in a person. The sacrament of friendship.
I began to understand that the world is not so scary if, around every significant corner, somebody is waiting to walk with you on the next part of the journey.
Think American Idol and imagine its opposite. That was punk rock.
There is something about our band that can never be too cocky or cool. Our best work is never too far from our worst, and when we get too professional or too hip, our audience seems to shrink. It’s as if we need to be up against the odds.
Suicide offers quick authority over a life that feels it has lost all agency.
We wanted to fuse with our audience in the way no punk band had been able to.
We all shared faith. Faith in each other. Faith that our coming together as musicians might prove more than the sum of our parts.
I hold to that line attributed to Francis of Assisi, who told his followers, “Go into the world to preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words.” We need less to be told how to live our lives and more to see people living inspirational lives. I’m also deeply conscious that I can’t live up to the badge I’ve pinned to my lapel. I’m a follower of Christ who can’t keep up. I can’t keep up with the ideas that have me on the pilgrimage in the first place.
It was Woody Guthrie who had a sticker on his guitar that read “This Machine Kills Fascists,” and in the face of all these questions Edge was finding a metaphorical version for his own guitar. “This machine makes peace.” We were coming upon an answer to a question we hadn’t been asking. The question wasn’t whether songs could save the world but rather could these songs save us?
“Ali is a great girl. She’s everything your mother could have asked for.” I ask him what he means by that. “Safety,” he says, staring at me.
I knew I could love at scale, but could I survive the intimacy of the close-up? As I stood in my wedding suit on the morning of the last day of summer, what would I have said if you’d asked me? I’d have said, “I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve found someone who can teach me.”
From now on Ali and I will be looking for home in each other.
Most people who enter a room with Larry Mullen find him striking, in the sense that he is a stylish, good-looking member of the species but also in the sense that he can be suspicious of why you are in his gaze. Of your intentions, your being in the room, and, perhaps on a bad day, your reason for being anywhere at all.
In 1983 we saw ourselves as a rock band in the image of The Clash, but we were probably more like The Who. Our songs had a spiritual yearning and melodrama that The Clash were just too streetwise for.
Larry did not like drum machines. The reason Larry Mullen didn’t like drum machines is that Larry Mullen is a drum machine. He has an incredible sense of timing. He could’ve been in Kraftwerk.
“It’s all you’ve got,” said the postman’s son. “That’s it. Your thoughts, they decide who you are.”
The very idea that your private thoughts or feelings are worth sharing with anyone outside your family or friends is already a kind of arrogance. Arrogance is the exit and entry point to the humiliation that art requires. Not unrelated is a dubious courage that when you find yourself out of your depth in troubled waters, you will discover how to swim. Another daft but true idea that creativity seems to depend on.
A key component to greatness is that the work has to answer a deep personal desire to make it. The song you are writing and recording has to be, above all other criteria, a song that you want to hear yourself. “One” was such a song. We wrote it because we really needed to hear it. It was made up of two discarded chord sequences that Edge came up with for a middle-eight breakdown section in “Mysterious Ways.” When he put them together, it became an invitation to sing a brand-new song. The Dalai Lama had written to us, not long before, asking us to be part of the Festival of Oneness. I hadn’t a
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Previously I’d had to ask Edge, who everybody knew was from the future, what it was like. He would think for a moment before his answer, which was always the same. “It’s better.”
That was in the background when I was writing a song called “Kite.” Something is about to give I can feel it coming I think I know what it is I’m not afraid to die I’m not afraid to live And when I’m flat on my back I hope to feel like I did.
What does it feel like for a health worker who can diagnose but not treat, who must tell their patients that nothing can be done for them? This anger is muted. It is not screamed, not even spoken. But I see it. More than that I feel it, and I want you to feel it now, you reading these pages. The anger is behind my eyes too. I am enraged that the world is allowing this to happen. When my family and my friends wanted to know why I spent so much time in the corridors of power, meeting all these suits, shaking all these fuckin’ hands…I just had to paint this picture. This hospital in Lilongwe.
It was no exaggeration when their president, Festus Mogae, declared, “We are threatened with extinction.” This virus is not just killing the young and vulnerable; it’s killing nurses, doctors, teachers, farmers, accountants, lawyers. Mothers and fathers. If no treatment reaches them, the hopes and dreams of the whole region will perish.
Sister Anne deals with death by telling it off or holding its hand. She laughs a lot, but there is no one more serious about transforming the lives of the poor. This is her service; she sees the face of her God in these people she lives with.
Condi had an ear that could sort through the discord on different issues and locate the top-line melody for the president.
Before the line disconnects, we hear the unmistakable Hungarian-tinged accent of George Soros. “Bono?” “Yes, George.” “Bono, you have sold out for a plate of lentils.”
“You’re pretty popular round here,” I offer up as the president waves back toward the pavement. “Yup,” he says, sighing. “It wasn’t always that way. When I came here first”—he pauses—“people used to wave at me with one finger.” I laugh because he’s funny.
“Just don’t mention guns. One killer is enough for a trip like this.” Americans, it seemed, have the same problem with firearms that we Irish have with alcohol. The problem being that we don’t think we have a problem.
