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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a pair of albums inspired by William Blake’s eighteenth-century collection of poems of the same name.
Music as the love that drives out all fear. Music is its own reason to exist.
The truth of it is that Bob Geldof opened the door and I walked through. He showed me, as an Irish person, that ideas get more authority the better they are described.
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.
It’s an extraordinary thing, the moment of surrender. To get down on your knees and ask the silence to save you, to reveal itself to you.
“Don’t appeal to the conscience of America,” he replied. “Appeal to the greatness of America. That’s how you’ll get the job done.”
He taught me that prayer is not an escape from real life but a passage toward it.
For many Americans, America doesn’t yet exist.
I can’t change the world. We can.
