Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

When I called Brian up, he was not particularly curious about our work. I don’t believe he was pretending when he said he hadn’t heard any of our songs. Evidently in a posture to turn us down, he was apologizing before the call got going, but he made one admission: a friend of his, the trumpeter Jon Hassell, had told him there was something about our band that was more than the usual colors in the rock ’n’ roll spectrum. Something different, something “other.” This apparently intrigued Brian because, as he explained, in the year 2050 people will look back on the rock era with one thought: how similar everyone sounded to everyone else. The same rough beats, the same bluesy-type emotions, and the same antiestablishment stance. I found this hard to take, knowing how very different we were from, say, Echo and the Bunnymen, let alone The Beatles. I now know it to be true. He told me that A minor to D should be outlawed in composition, before asking if we’d be interested in doing an album without any minor chords. At the very least, he said, we should make sure that the sex of the chord is not clear. He meant minor or major. I seized my chance. “But that’s what Edge does with his guitar style,” I explained. “That’s what we do as a band. We share a guitar chord, often a suspended chord, and try to avoid those obvious blues notes which put it in a minor key or those obvious major chords which make things jolly and smiley.” Brian Eno was becoming interested.

Bono pitching Brian Eno