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ALL
THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND (2000)
.::
BEAUTIFUL DAY ::. [back
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[...]
Lyrically, Bono says the song is about "a person who loses everything and
has never been happier. It's a song about taking stock of the important
things in life."
(from
"Track By Track -- U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind" by Larry Flick,
Billboard
magazine, September 29, 2000)
BONO: [...] Actually, there's kind of a space theme to this album.
A space theme?
BONO: Making this record it was coming up to the millennium and they were kind of replaying the whole century on TV. They were showing shots of the Apollo moon landing one night and, I'm sure this goes for a lot of people, but they're the ones when I was a child that really showed me the size of the Earth -- how tiny it was and how big the universe was and how full of possibilities and danger and potential -- you know, all of these things. And there's a little bit of it on a lot of songs on the album. It just kind of bleeds in.
Where exactly?
BONO: Like in the middle of "Beautiful Day" -- in this song about a guy who loses everything but has never felt better -- you have this hard cut to all the stuff the astronauts spotted from orbit. The Bedouin fires, the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon, all those things. And I do like that idea of going from the domestic to the... extra-terrestrial.
(from
"The Final Frontier" by Olaf Tyaransen,
Hot Press, October 26, 2000)
All That You Can't Leave Behind closes the cycle in a rush of clean arrangements and heady choruses. And it works: "Beautiful Day," the band's first single in two years, topped the Australian charts in a single bound two weeks ago, as it did elsewhere.
The makeover is not purely cosmetic. The song's opening lines, "The heart is a bloom / Shoots up through the stony ground," is a reaffirmation of hope against great odds, a classic U2 theme if ever there was one. Bono agrees it strikes a kind of keynote to the whole experience.
"I think sometimes if you lose everything, it's as good a place to start as any," he says. "That's kinda what the song's about. I know somebody who lost pretty much everything: had a terminal illness, gave up their job, everything, 'cause they wanted to smell the flowers while they can, and they just had the best time ever.
"It turned out they were wrongly diagnosed, but they never went back. You know, sometimes the moment when the house is falling down around your ears and your friends have all deserted you is actually when you get started."
(from
"Rock Of Age Is Harder To Do" by Michael Dwyer,
The Age, October 27, 2000)
MTVi
News: How did "Beautiful Day" come together, and why was that the
right one to start with, as a single and on the album?
Bono:
It's optimistic. It's just an up idea, that you can lose everything,
and somehow find yourself, you know. And, you know, you can lose
your girlfriend, your house; everything's going wrong. And the character
in the song is just, he never felt better (laughs). And, it's a little
haiku perhaps, or Zen, but it's just a great idea, and you know, optimistic.
To write music that's up, that isn't schlock, is quite hard. It's
much easier to paint with black.
(from
"U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV,
January 2001)
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STUCK IN A MOMENT YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF ::. [back
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One
of the finest songs on All That You Can't Leave Behind is called "Stuck
in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," and it is an argument between someone
committing suicide and his angry friend. In public, Bono has been
edging around the song, but at Irving Plaza, for the first time, he introduces
it quite plainly: "This is a song about friendship," he says. "It's
for a good friend… Michael Hutchence."
"I
don't know why I felt uncomfortable to do that," he tells me. "I
just wanted to do that." (Hutchence died of asphyxiation in an Australian
hotel room in Sydney in 1997. His death was ruled a suicide, though
his partner, Paula Yates, who herself died of an overdose last September,
argued he lost his life in a solitary sex game that went wrong.)
Bono
talks about the times he and Hutchence spent together in the two years
after 1993's Zooropa tour. For much of that time, Bono and the Edge
lived in a house in France: "A couple of years of pure joy, just listening
to music, and people came from far and wide to stay. I grew a beard,
put on a few pounds and drank a lot of whiskey, and it was the most extraordinary
life, just one of those stupid times when you fall in love with music and
everything." (It was the spirit of that long party they originally
intended to capture on their last album, Pop, but characteristically, the
mission altered: "It's like a party for two songs, and then it's the hangover.")
Some
nights they would be sitting outside, having a drink at one in the morning,
and Hutchence would just appear. He'd climb in over the gates.
And they'd go out. One night they ended up sleeping on the beach.
"The
first verse, it's really very defensive," he says. (It begins, "I'm
not afraid of anything in this world / There's nothing you can throw at
me that I haven't already heard.") "I think other people who have
lost a mate to suicide will all tell you the same thing -- just the overpowering
guilt that you weren't there for that person. As anyone around here
will tell you, friendship is a thing that I hold very sacred. Cocteau,
I think he only wrote one serious essay in his life, and it was on the
subject of friendship -- friendship is higher than love. He goes
on about how it's less glamorous, less passionate, less everything, but
perhaps endures and comes from as deep a place. So it really threw
me. Can you really be that busy that you don't notice your mate on
the slide, as it were? I am the most loyal, and the most unreliable,
friend. It's the way I am -- I forget phone numbers… I don't use
the phone for fun now… So I just remember feeling this overpowering sense
of guilt. And then anger. And annoyance. That song is
an argument. It's a row between mates. You're kind of trying
to slap somebody around the face, trying to wake them up out of an idea.
In my case it's a row. Although, oddly enough, we discussed suicide
a few times. And we both agreed how pathetic it was."
[...]
You're
confident that it was suicide?
Pause.
"You know, I'd love to think that he went out on some spectacular sexual
maneuver, but knowing the state of him at that time, I don't think so.
But I'm sure of this: If he had lasted half an hour longer, he would be
alive now. He couldn't see past, he couldn't see out that half an
hour. And apparently that's what people do… and a friend of his told
me that he'd brought up our conversation a few days before that."
[...]
How
did the argument in the song form in your head?
"Being
right there. Just wanting to be in that half hour. So in the
song, I'm right there -- it's like, just wanting to be in that half an
hour. I wanted to have that argument in that half an hour.
But I didn't put down that it was about Michael Hutchence because, for
me, songs, I never make things specific to anything. And I didn't
feel comfortable saying it while Paula was alive, because I knew it was
important to her that he didn't commit suicide. But he did, and we
have to say that. And I know the people that he called that night,
and I know." By now, Bono's eyes are as you know they must be.
"I felt the biggest respect I could pay him was not to write some stupid
soppy fucking song, so I wrote a really tough, nasty little number.
Sort of, you know, slapping him around the head. And I'm sorry, but
that's how it came out for me."
So
it just basically says: If you stay stuck in this suicidal moment, you're
an idiot?
"Just,
come on, you know. Come on."
(from
"Comeback of the year" by Chris Heath, Rolling
Stone, May 2000)
There's
a quality of philosophical acceptance of mortality, though. There
is no fear of death in the lyrics.
[Bono:]
"No, there's not. It feels fearless to me, the album. The opening
line of 'Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of' is 'I'm not afraid of
anything in this world'. A pop song starts with that, you have to
back it up. That was written for a friend of mine who committed suicide,
and it's an argument with him. But it's sort of a declaration of
your own position: it's got that attitude of, you know, when your jaw sticks
out, like you do before a row. It's like somebody's in a stupor and
you're trying to wake them up, 'cause the cops are coming, and they're
sitting at the wheel and you're trying to get them out of the car cause
they're gonna crash it. I wondered why the first verse was so first
person? Why was it about me when I was writing a song about a mate?
And I realised it was a defence because I felt so guilty. The original
opening line was 'I'm not afraid of anything in this world / But when I
see what it's done to you, then I'm scared'. Imagine making pop music
out of all this! (Laughs). There's a thing!"
(from
"Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot
Press, December 15, 2000)
Amazon.co.uk:
That said [Bono's comments on the allegedly autobiographical nature
of "New York"], as the song stands you don't really go out of your
way to distance yourself from the character.
Bono:
That's true. I suppose Michael Hutchence (INXS frontman) left anyone
who knew him with the feeling of... be very careful how close to the ledge
you walk. If there's anyone being heckled on the record, it's probably
myself. That's always the way with songwriters, really -- you preach
what you need to hear yourself, so I'm sure that's finally what "Stuck
in a Moment," for example, is about.
(from
an interview at Amazon
UK)
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WALK ON ::. [back
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We
are talking about the song "Walk On," the one that provides the album's
title. It is dedicated to (and loosely refers to) the Burmese opposition
leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who stayed to oppose the totalitarian regime
in Burma rather than be with her husband and son. Bono pauses for
a long time, trying to work out how to explain something. "If you've
ever had a fright in your life, someone close to you dies, or whatever,"
he begins, "things come into sharp focus and you just… suddenly some people
become more important to you than others. Some ideas become more
important to you than others. I think the Dalai Lama says, 'Begin
with death, start from there, and you won't go far wrong.'" Bono
chuckles. "I don't think he was just having a bad day. Christ
says, I think, in the Sermon on the Mount, 'If you love your life too much,
you've already lost it.' Which is an interesting one. As a
younger man I remember I didn't understand what that meant, because I loved
life. You're holding on so tight to it you're incapable of doing
anything with it. It's about fear."
But,
I put to him, the phrase "all that you can't leave behind" is talking about
death, isn't it?
"Yeah."
He tries to explain the reasons why he no longer feels the reckless immortality
he assumed when he was twenty, and alludes to a recent private crisis he'd
rather not specify. "It's hard for me to talk about in particular.
I think I'd rather just say I had a bit of a fright, a shock of some kind,
and leave it at that. But it wasn't really just people close to me
being sick or Michael Hutchence dying…" Then he adds, "I think Michael
Hutchence's death really threw me, and my father got sick, and it was just
one of those years. Everything came into sharp focus for me.
There's a lot of genuine love of life on that record."
Despite
that spirit, I can't think of a record besides Bob Dylan's Time Out of
Mind more concerned with mortality…
"Right.
And he had a fright."
(from
"Comeback of the year" by Chris Heath, Rolling
Stone, May 2000)
MTVi
News: "Walk On" is another track that really seemed central to the
album. You took the album title from the lyrics...
Bono:
It was inspired by a Burmese leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her struggle
for free elections in Burma. She left her comfort of her home in
Oxford, as an academic, and her family and her son and her husband, and
went to do the right thing for her people. And it was just one of
the great acts of courage in the 20th century. And it's continuing
into the 21st century, and her life is -- she's been under house arrest
for some time now, and people get, you know, we all get very worried about
how she's doing. At first, I was writing it from the point of view
of her family, or her son, you know, her husband, and then in the end I
kept it a little abstract and just let it be a love song about somebody
having to leave a relationship for the right reasons.
(from
"U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV,
January 2001)
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.::
KITE ::. [back
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MTVi
News: On "Kite," you sing of being "the last of the rock stars when
hip-hop drove the big cars / in the time when new media / was the
big idea." How close does that come to summing up your feelings about
being in a big rock band in this age of hip-hop and rap-rock and teen pop?
Bono:
I just kinda wanted to put a date on it. Like the way you might in
a diary. And it was also some bait for rock critics who might get
annoyed. I always feel it's one of our jobs in U2, as well as kind
of singing your life, is just occasionally to annoy people. (Laughs)
What do you mean "the last of the rock stars"? I could see a lot
of people were gonna get cross with that one.
(from
"U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV,
January 2001)
"It's
a reference," he [Bono] explains, "to an absurd moment of parenting,
where I took a kite up on Killiney Hill with Jordan and Eve -- I'd been
away, and wanted to do the dad thing. It was very Tommy Cooper --
the kite blew off the line and smashed to smithereens on the first flight,
and Evie just asked if they could go home and play with their tamagotchis.
So the song is about realising you have to let go of them at some point.
Songwriting is still a surprise, because you often think you're describing
one thing, and it just turns on its head. Suddenly I was back in
a caravan site when I was a kid, and I realised that he had tried to do
exactly the same thing with a kite, and it had gone equally badly.
I realised I wasn't singing from quite as theoretical a place as I thought."
(from
"Pro Bono" by Andrew Mueller, The
Weekend Australian, December 01, 2001)
Did you bring "Kite" to his [Bono's father] attention or was he aware of it?
[Bono:] No. There's an odd one. I have this verse about taking the kids up on Killiney Hill with a kite. Then I realised, I went back in my head, and I remembered being in Rush or Skerries, one incident where exactly the same thing happened. We used to have a caravan, and I sort of felt the goodbye aspect of the song was not from me to him, but from him to me. That's the thing about songwriting -- you're the last to know what you're on about.
(from
"Matter Of Life And Death" by Niall Stokes, Hot Press Annual 2002, December 01, 2001)
Chris
Evans: "In a time of new media, that was the big idea" -- is written
on this album. Obviously you now think that's not the big idea anymore.
Bono:
Nope, that's the song "Kite" you're talking about there, that's a way of
dating it. It's a very emotional song, "Kite," it's about letting
go of somebody you love, we all have to do that, you know, whether it's
a family or lovers or whatever, and I just wanted to put a date on it,
it's no big comment.
(from
Chris Evans Breakfast Show)
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.::
PEACE ON EARTH ::. [back
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Inside
the hotel, he [Bono] sits at a table in the back of the closed restaurant
and talks about the 1998 terrorist bombing in Northern Ireland that led
him to write the angry "Peace on Earth."
"The
bombing in Omagh traumatized the whole country," he says of the incident,
which killed more than two dozen people including many children.
"People were weeping openly on the street. They read all the names
on the radio at 6 p.m. and all traffic stopped.
"There
was a real stink in the air that Christmas in Dublin and Belfast.
Children's choirs were on the pavement singing about peace on Earth, but
it sounded out of tune."
(from
"Far Down the Road, a Sudden U-Turn" by Robert Hilburn, Los
Angeles Times, October 29, 2000)
Time and again, he [Bono] comes across the accepted philosophy that the world is ruined, that there is no hope, that the System will always win and justice is a lie.
"That's the context that 'Peace on Earth' was written in," he says, plainly, of the album's most shockingly cynical song. "It was written from exactly that place. Literally on the day of the Omagh bomb. And the despair. And not just the lives that had been destroyed but the peace process and all these things... it was a joke. And then following through at Christmas, children singing 'Peace on earth, goodwill to all mankind' and you just think, 'Shut the f--k up.' Y'know? That's how people felt. I know Ali did. I didn't, and I don't know why, but I wrote their song. That thing of 'How could you talk about that? F--k off.' But I think the brave ones are the ones that drown it out, with a bigger noise, with a bigger idea. I don't think they're often stars. They're often mothers, firemen, working people who get on with their lives."
(from
"Pop Smart" by Sylvia Patterson, Sunday Herald, November 05, 2000)
[Bono:]
"'Peace On Earth' is so heavy. Just calling a song 'Peace on Earth'
is like mud pie, right? You just wanna know where that guy parks
his car (laughs). I'd wanna give somebody a slap for that!
So it has to be a great song. It's a very bitter pill to swallow
and it was written literally on the day the Omagh bomb went off, right
then. Nobody could actually believe it. In Ireland, on the
six o'clock news, when they read out the names of all the people who died
the city came to a complete standstill. People were just weeping...
in cars, on O'Connell Street, all over the place. It was really a
trauma for most people. Because not only was it the destruction of
the lives it was a destruction of the peace process, which had been put
together with sticky tape and glue and tacks and a lot of faith.
It seemed it was destroyed. It would be hard to describe to people
who were not Irish what that felt like that day. It was certainly
the lowest day in my life, outside of personal losses. I couldn't
believe it, that people could do that. At that time. That Christmas,
the whole 'peace on earth, goodwill to all men' struck a sour note.
It was very hard to be a believer that Christmas. In the song, they
are real names of victims of the bomb... but I also tried to bring it back
to Cedarwood Road and growing up and my own violence, remembering all of
that. There's a vanity in there: 'they say what you mock will overtake
you / and you become a monster so the monster won't break you'. I
put in a couple of my own aphorisms as if they are out there! (laughs)
It's a terrible cheat as a writer but I'd love to get one of them off,
you know? 'Oh yeah, they do say that, don't they?' No!"
(from
"Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot
Press, December 15, 2000)
Q:
Does coming from Ireland, where there is a history of violence and terrorism,
give you any added perspective on what has happened here [Sept. 11]?
A:
[Bono:] There's a song on the album called "Peace on Earth"
that talks about that, but I didn't want to do it in the show because there
is such a bitterness to it. It vents a certain anger about how the
killing just keeps going on. But someone at one of the shows held
up this big banner that quoted one of the lines, "Their lives are bigger
than any big idea," and I think that has struck a chord.
(from
"Joy Makes a Return" by Robert Hilburn, Los
Angeles Times, December 15, 2001)
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.::
NEW YORK ::. [back
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Behind us, as we lounge on U2's waterside patio, the final mix of discursive travelogue "New York" wobbles out of a crap Sony boom box. With little Eve Hewson on his lap, Bono sings along...
"I hit an iceberg in my life / But here I am still afloat / Lose your balance, lose your wife / In the queue for the lifeboat / You've got to put the women and children first / But you've got an unquenchable thirst... for New York."
Like a few of Bono's characters on All That You Can't Leave Behind, the lyric outlines a man on a moral holiday, braving the temptations of escape and infidelity. Encouraging the theory that it's autobiographical is the fact that Bono has just bought an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
"It's important to describe your demons in order to deal with them," says Bono. "I have a side of me that wants to run really fast away from everything that you could call home and responsibilities. But I have another side, which is stronger, that draws me towards home and those very same responsibilities. When I'm at work I play out those things... but maybe if I hadn't found Ali and this community of people, then maybe I'm just lazy enough to have surrendered."
You kept in the bit about midlife crisis...
"I was seriously wondering whether to or not. Just looking at you when we played it to you in Dublin, I could see you writing the headline [laughs]. But it's just funnier, that line. From this character, it's believable."
Bono laughs, then frowns.
"It's not autobiography. It's quite the opposite in the sense that I'm coming out of a period: I have run off, I'm back now. I'm more at home... with myself. I had a bit of fright, basically, and the song 'Kite' comes out of that too. I hadn't been around for a while and was determined to do the proper Dad thing. I took the kids to Killiney Hill in Dublin county to fly a kite. Up it went and immediately down it came, and smashed to smithereens. The kids just looked at me: [affects unimpressed child look] 'Come on Dad, let's go and play some video games.' How cruel is that?"
(from
"The Elastic Bono Band", Q Magazine, November 01, 2000)
There
is one line that really irritates me on the album. It's in "New York,"
when you sing "I just bought a place in New York!" and I'm thinking 'typical
fucking rock star!'
[Bono:]
"I was gonna change the line to something less consumerist but why I left
it in was... I had just got a place in New York! (Laughs) And
it kinda made me smile. Even though the song is not autobiographical.
OK, now you're thinking 'the bastard's got a nice place on Central Park'
but the character of the song it could be a shoe box, you don't know!
In fact, the song originally ended with a free-form conversation about
Frank Sinatra and I had to take it out 'cause I think it became self conscious:
now it was me talking and then the apartment suddenly got turned into a
penthouse and it became a Bono song about mid-life crisis. But it's
a true story. I was at dinner once with Frank and he took a blue
paper napkin from the table, he was just staring at it, and he said, to
no one in particular, 'I remember when my eyes were this blue'. He
put it and kept it in an inside pocket. It was very cool."
(from
"Confessions Of A Rock Star" by Neil McCormack, Hot
Press, December 15, 2000)
MTVi
News: "New York" has nods, it seems, to both Lou Reed and Frank Sinatra.
How did that song come together?
Bono:
There was a verse about Lou Reed, that didn't make it, and a verse about
Frank Sinatra (that also didn't make it). And Lou has an album called
New York, and he mentions my name on one of the tracks, "Beginning of a
Great Adventure." And I just think he is to New York what James Joyce
was to Dublin. And I just couldn't help -- I just did a little impersonation
of him in the first verse, and I hope it'll make him smile. But when
I saw him a few weeks ago, I didn't tell him. A lot of the lyrics
were written on the spot over two takes, and then I went away and kind
of, collaged it up based on my experience in the summer in New York last
year. It's not autobiography, but it is based on -- I was there when
it was 104 degrees, and I watched some people do their very best to destroy
their peaceful lives.
(from
"U2: Biting Pop's Arse", MTV,
January 2001)
Amazon.co.uk:
In the song "New York" on All That You Can't Leave Behind, you sing about
having a mid-life crisis. People would assume that it's autobiographical...
Bono:
They would. I've realised that. There used to be a verse at
the end about Frank Sinatra, because if I was going to be singing about
New York, New York, I felt like I should. It went "When I'm down
on my luck / I sometimes think of Frank Sinatra / I met him once / He was
more than generous / At dinner one evening he found a blue paper napkin
... and he stared at it and said to no one in particular, I remember when
my eyes were this blue." Which is how the song ended. And it's
a true story, though what actually happened was that after he'd said it,
he carefully folded it up and put it in his pocket so he could look at
it again later. It was this moment of melancholy that I'll never
forget. But I took out that scene because I didn't want people to
think the song was autobiographical -- you know, I did that song with him
and everything (on Duets Vol. 1). If I had a mid-life crisis, it
was when I was 27. I have electrical storms of a different kind now.
The character I was writing about was someone who'd come to New York to
burn himself out, to lose himself, and that's not me.
(from
an interview at Amazon
UK)
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