The new U2 album – their first for nine years – is released next week, and in the run-up to it, the band have been doing a number of high-profile interviews.
One of those has been with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, back at their old school Mount Temple in Dublin. And while talking about their recent past, Larry Mullen Jr’s recovery from his neck injury, the Sphere residency, and the new album, The Edge mused that “We don’t really have a musical genre that we fit into.”
The guitarist then elaborated, saying: “I discovered this recently very clearly when I was playing around with some of these AI music programmes. I was trying to see if it could come up with a U2 song. They couldn’t. And I realised that it is possible to get it to write a country song because it’s very strictly codified.”
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He then admitted that of all the elements in the ‘U2 sound’, his guitar was probably the most easily recognisable (and thus easiest to duplicate). “(But) our songwriting is never a formula. We don’t know how to do that,” he insisted.
Lowe then cut in, praising the track Greatest Show on Earth from the new album as an example of something AI couldn’t come up with. “Our approach is to find something that is intriguing, inspiring, and just let it dictate where we go,” said The Edge. “So we always find ourselves surprised by where things go. And there is a deliberate element to it, but it’s also kind of a mysterious thing.”
The group also talked about Torn, the Dolly Parton collab on the new album, and the late singer’s last recorded performance. It was a song that had been started by Parton, rather than U2 themselves, Bono explains: “She said, ‘I have a song starter called Torn. Now you can take it somewhere else. I might like to see where you can take it’. And it arrived in and it was quite traditional, and we really took it somewhere else.”
“I was really surprised when she ran with it,” he says. And not just because it had “some of the friction of the times” as its subject matter. “She sang it and she just took flight. She was ill at the time – we didn’t know how ill – and she got out of bed to sing this song and it meant a lot to us at the time just knowing that she was ill and would consider doing something with us.”
Anyway, we will get a chance to hear it, and the rest of the album, when Carnaval De Luz lands next Friday.
