Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

I’d always be first up when there was an altar call, the “come to Jesus” moment. I still am. If I was in a café right now and someone said, “Stand up if you’re ready to give your life to Jesus,” I’d be the first to my feet. I took Jesus with me everywhere and I still do. I’ve never left Jesus out of the most banal or profane actions of my life.

Edge has enough musical theory to guess, but in truth he is feeling his way through the musical scale, looking for notes, for a particular order of notes that other people haven’t used. Looking for the space between them, the gaps in between notes. Looking to pare down everything to the most minimal expression. Edge is a minimalist by nature. I am not. I am a maximalist. Edge has a poker face. I do not. You could be sitting opposite Edge and never know that he had four aces and a two of clubs. Or nothing at all. One of the great bluffers. There’s stuff you can learn from people who don’t tell you anything. Like how not to react when there is a crisis. Like how to stay still and maybe even unearth levity from the seriousness of a situation. Edge is the silence inside every noise. He’s the light inside the paint.

“The elephant in the room” is a phrase I enjoy, having at different times been either elephant or room. We can lose ourselves in situations or conversations and miss the obvious. We’re looking for someone to save us or a solution to a problem, and they’re right in front of us hiding in plain sight. Hanging in our house is a wall-sized piece of art by the filmmaker Wim Wenders. The Road to Emmaus is a recent photograph of that road, just outside Jerusalem, where close friends of Jesus are said to have walked with him, without knowing it. A couple of days after his crucifixion. There’s a rumor he’s alive and no one can find the body. His friends are confused, grief-stricken, terrified, and oblivious to the identity of this stranger until the moment when he says goodbye. Now they wake up to the possibility that the very heart of their faith has been beating loudly at their side. If only they’d had eyes to see. I have taken flights where the person seated next to me, the person I was dodging having a conversation with, turned out to hold a valuable piece of the puzzle of my life that I would be lost without. When you’re open, a hitchhiker—a “randomer,” as my daughter Eve calls them—can become an angel. When you’re least expecting one. And not just people. Places, too, can spark a rare connection that is initially hidden.

I look back now, I see that the kind of brokenness that was our band on that first injurious tour of the U.K. has always been part of our appeal. 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.

All musical instruments are useful for love and exhortation. Only one is essential for war. The drums. The drums are thin skin stretched tightly over hollow volumes, mostly of wood, which gives them their earthiness, their sexiness. Slapping without the tickling. The hand or the stick bounces across the skin of the drums, throwing the listener forward into a dance, into a physical response. For war, and in particular marching to war, wood was replaced by metal. The snare, as it’s known for good reason, supplies body armor to the already athletic muscular choices available. There is a particular violence built into the snare drum, and the rat-a-tat of a military tattoo was exactly what we were looking for with the opening of “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” I don’t ever want to be at war with Larry Mullen, but I don’t ever want to go to war without him. From a very junior age, Larry Mullen has explained his craft and art like this: “I hit things for a living.” And he does. He can hit people, too, not physically, but psychically. 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. Drummers are born, not made.

How long? How long must we sing this song? A long time, actually, already more than a third of a century. Larry has an unusual concentration; he is single-minded. He is there for the audience by signaling to them that he is not theirs. He is his own man. A protective layer, rooted in his artistic sensitivity, covers him. He is often on guard lest somebody take advantage of what could be vulnerability. There are no artists I know who are not caught in this duality, but Larry has made some cool threads out of his protective layer. I’m not far behind, but I don’t cover up as well. He is the most rock star and the least rock star that anyone could be. He likes—and he doesn’t—the life that comes with it. There’s something deep and primal in the relationship between a drummer and a singer, the oldest and most primitive of communications, the rhythm and the melody. Tapping and birdsong. The slow, hesitant discovery that in a great band we are both shadow and shelter for each other. “Need” is the word that comes to mind.

Larry couldn’t stand jazz, and jazz was the reason his dad let him have a drum kit. So-called serious music was never Larry’s bag, and that tells you how Larry became a pop star. By pretending he was going to play jazz. Drummers are born, pop stars are packaged, but rock stars are the self-made members of the species that is Homo erectus show business. I wonder if Larry loves being a rock star more than he will own up to, but I have no doubt that he is the best equipped to play Rock Star in U2. Adam wanted to be one and pulled it off—until it pulled him off his pedestal and he had to get sober. I pretended, still do, but am not fully convincing despite the bully pulpit. Edge always knew it was a folly, no job for a grown-up. Larry became a rock star by denying it was ever his intention.

Even if I’ve done it to make the case—that we now make consistently with the U.S. military—that investing in USAID is investing in peace and security in far-off places where impoverishment is an invitation to bad actors and failed states, an invitation to sociopolitical chaos. And even if the secretary of defense agrees that in the developing world it’s cheaper to prevent the fires than to put them out. This is quite a jump from Central America in 1986. Now even a former supreme commander of NATO, General Jim Jones, leads the same chorus. And—wait for it—even Donald Trump’s future secretary of defense General James “Mad Dog” Mattis rebuked his own president, I paraphrase, “If you want to cut USAID then buy me more bullets.”

I remember hearing the American evangelical Tony Campolo explaining that there are 2,003 verses of scripture that relate to the poor, that poverty is second only to redemption in the priorities of the God found in the Old and New Testaments. It’s a theme you can trace from Moses to Doubting Thomas, from the Torah through the beatitudes. Strikingly, only once does Jesus speak about judgment, and when he does, it’s about how we treat the poor: And they too will reply, “Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?” Then the King will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.” And yet for some reason even now people of faith think that what’s going on in their—or other people’s—pants is more important to God than, say, what’s happening to the homeless. The lives of the poorest people are at the heart of Christianity, but sometimes religion seems to be what happens when Jesus, like Elvis, has left the building. It becomes a bless me club for the Holy Rollers and navel gazers.

If you’re a rock band that formed in the late 1970s, you have a Beatles view of the world or you have a Stones view. Though Mick Jagger was the greatest frontman ever, we wanted to be The Beatles more than we wanted to be the Stones, in the sense that The Beatles changed their sound on pretty much every album. Sometimes their producer, George Martin, brought in orchestral players or quartets. Sometimes the band would solicit guest musicians like Billy Preston and Eric Clapton. Other times the four of them swapped instruments: Paul McCartney playing drums or Ringo singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Who knew? Wow! A strategy to keep things fresh for them and their audience, a strategy that spawned some of the greatest songs in all of songland. By contrast, the Rolling Stones. If you know their work well, close your eyes and listen to them play in your head. Above any one single song, it’s a single sound that you hear. It’s their sound. They own it. Its signature is a certain holler, a weave of guitar, a rhythmic gait that’s as Black as any white boys have been. A sexy, uninhibited sound that encouraged suburban boys like me to check out more urban influences like the Meters, the Isley Brothers, the blues in general, and, yes, the thrill I still have listening to some disco. The Rolling Stones have had many faces and facets over sixty years, but critics tend to overlook the sonic innovation of “2000 Light Years from Home” or the exotic hook lines that Brian Jones b...

I’m sitting in the front seat of a red Range Rover. The driver, who has just picked me up from John Lennon Airport in Liverpool, is Paul McCartney. He’s taking me and Jimmy Iovine on a magical mystery tour through his hometown, showing us the neighborhoods where the Fab Four grew up. He’s pointing here, there, and everywhere. And apologizing. “You sure you’re interested in this?” “Oh yes,” I reply. “I couldn’t be more interested.” “Yeah? Okay, well, that’s where George’s neighborhood was. It was actually a rough neighborhood, George’s. Really Ringo’s was a little tougher. I’ll show you where he was in a minute. John’s was like a little nobby. Not too nobby, but a little nobby. And mine, my family were okay. We were over there.” As he drives, he points out the window. “There’s the 86 bus. Myself and John used to ride there, just gone by. You sure you don’t mind me telling you this?” “Oh no, I don’t mind. Please go on.” Do I mind? It’s like Moses giving you a tour of the holy land. It’s like Freud giving you a tour of the brain. It’s like Neil Armstrong giving you a tour of the moon. It’s like Paul McCartney driving me through the geography of a music that has transformed my life. We pull up at a light. “See over there? That newsagent? It’s changed a bit, but that’s where I had my first real conversation with John.” Now I know a bit about The Beatles lore and wonder if his memory is playing tricks. “But I thought your first conversation with John was when he was in the Quarr...

But if my faith is a crutch, I want to throw it away. I’d rather fall over. I remain more suspicious of religion than most people who’d never darken the door of a church. I’ve never quite found a church I could call home, and I tell the kids to be wary of religion, that what the human spirit longs for may not be corralled by any sect or denomination, contained by a building. It’s more likely a daily discipline, a daily surrender and rebirth. It’s more likely that church is not a place but a practice, and the practice becomes the place. There is no promised land. Only the promised journey, the pilgrimage. We search through the noise for signal, and we learn to ask better questions of ourselves and each other.

So where is God? Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable. In the slums and cardboard boxes where the poor have to play house. In the doorways as we step over the divine on our way to work. In the silence of a mother who has unknowingly infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war, in the bare hands digging for air. God is with the terrorized. At sea with the desperate, clinging onto drowning dreams. God is with the refugee. I hear his only son was one. God is with the poor and the vulnerable, and God is with us if we are with them.

Service, ambition, duty, loyalty, the desire to be the best, the desire to say yes—not such bad character traits to have cherished. I always thought of them as strengths, but lately I wonder if somewhere along the line they became a cover for something more suspicious. The demand to be at the center of the action. To make God in our own image, to help her across the road as if she were a little old lady. This perpetual longing to be filled with the extraordinary so that you begin to lose appreciation for the ordinary. If your shoulder is black and blue from trying to enter every locked room, maybe there are rooms you do not need to enter. Or maybe some doors have a key in the lock that will gently turn. This long struggle for art, for justice, for self-aggrandizement. All this ambition, all this ego. Are these goals fired by the engine of a sense of duty or of a swollen sense of self ? So often the fight is not with the world but with yourself. I was always fascinated by the story of Elijah, who is told to wait on the voice of God in a cave on a hillside. There he was, waiting for the earth to shake, and shake it did, but it did not offer up a word. Neither did the melodrama of the celestial fires or cyclone offer any clues. When it arrived, the divine communication was such a whisper that Elijah almost didn’t recognize it. In one translation it is described as “the still small voice”; in another it is translated as “the sound of silence.” Maybe Paul Simon heard it too: An...