How I Fell Back In Love With U2 (Maybe U Will, 2?)
by Dame Sophie, Happily Re-Ensconced in the Bosom of Her Talented & Dramatic Irish Sons
Like a lot of people who listened to the radio and bought music in the 80s & 90s, I loved U2, and then I really, really didn’t. They hit their popularity stride right when I was very ready to be swept up in their dramatic, political fervor. I plunked down my babysitting money for a big, moody-ass Joshua Tree poster to put on my bedroom wall, I got a cute boy to dub copies of War and The Unforgettable Fire for me, and then I bought myself a subscription to Rolling Stone so I could obsessively reread all of their U2 coverage, especially The Edge’s interview about his musical influences. (As I had been a George girl, so I was immediately & forever remain an Edge girl.)
I saved up my babysitting money to see them on the ZooTV tour the week before my senior year of high school started — my friends & I got seats on the field! We were so psyched! And then we loved Zooropa, too! Everything was so great! And then I went to see them on the Popmart tour in 1997, and I just didn’t like it. How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was…fine, I guess? Obviously, I bought a copy, but the thrill was gone. And so a solid 15 years or so passed. U2 continued to tour, and they did that Spiderman musical (????), and Bono had that terrible bike accident, and then they continued to tour some more, and I just thought, with a sad sigh, “well, we’ll always have Paris.” I tweeted snottily about it back in 2013, saying weeeeee were never getting back together, but still sometimes like to make out.
But then they announced The Joshua Tree 30th Anniversary Tour and all my “ugh, they haven’t done anything interesting since 1993” cynicism was washed clean away. U2 was touring my gateway album! They were going to play it in full! The 12 year-old who played & rewound and played & rewound her copy of The Joshua Tree was beside herself with giddy anticipation.
My husband & I attended their show in Philadelphia & let me tell you, it was a religious experience. I started crying the second I heard their walk-on music (“The Whole of the Moon”, by the Waterboys, just take me now, Lord), and didn’t stop for a solid 20 minutes, and that was before they even started playing a single note from The Joshua Tree. I was taken directly back to the glories of ZooTV, and better still, everything was tempered & strengthened & given new meaning by my memories of all those good old times and even by the terrible awareness that as a people, we US folk are in as much of a political and cultural pickle as we were in the 1980s. It was beautiful and energizing, and sad and enraging all at once. I loved every minute.
So. Hi, friends. If you’re feeling susceptible to being swept up (or swept back up) into a love for this band of brothers, here are some of my current favorite things & some places to go next.
- Ok, so first of all, these four dudes — working together since they were scrappy teens in the mid-70s — all still love each other and are having the best time together on this tour. One of many things I cried about at the show we saw was the evident joy in their faces as they played together. They were having so much fun making sure we all had so much fun with them. Their delight in each other was every bit as infectious as their beautiful music. That fun was really moving. 41 years into this enterprise, they don’t need to tour. They don’t need to do anything they’re not 100% into doing. They love it, so they do, and I’ve been very happy to be swept up by and into that joy.
- Specifically, it seems very clear that Bono and The Edge are the OG Harry & Niall. The evidence:


- I mean. QED, friends. There’s obviously some kind of non-murder-based horcrux use in play here. I could just rest my case, but the historically-minded Tumblr-based fan Mars has this excellent summary of Bono & The Edge’s 41-year friendship and creative partnership. Theirs is a homoerotically-charged friendship & artistic collaboration of the highest order and I am here for it. Relatedly, I now have a high quality 5x7 of this image framed in my house right now. The photographer is happy to sell you a copy, too.
- People (myself included, on more than one occasion) like to ding U2 for being blowhardishly, sometimes clumsily political. And yeah, sorry, guys, rhetorical subtlety is not really your long suit. But when I was 12, I didn’t know anything about apartheid, or the repressive political regimes in Argentina and Chile, or the troubles in Northern Ireland. I barely knew anything about Martin Luther King, Jr. You know what’s a very effective inducement to start following world news? Getting great, catchy songs about geopolitics stuck in your head. This nerd started reading the international section of the newspaper and joined Amnesty International thanks to U2. They had zero fucks to give about how uncool it was to write & sing those songs, and that’s…kind of cool, actually.
- E*MO*TIONs: for my money, nobody delivers a heartbreaking, impressionistic tone poem like Bono. Seriously, when was the last time you saw their Live Aid performance of “Bad”? Give yourself the gift of a rewatch of this superlatively earnest jam about heroin addiction (and please look beyond the mullet, I beg you). The Edge is a very close second in this category, as in the case of his spare, bleak as hell “Love Is Blindness” and “Running To Stand Still” (oh, is that what it feels like to have your heart ripped out of your chest so delicately that you think it feels good while it’s happening? Ok, great, good to know.) (Not sure why Mario Batali is there, but he is FEELING IT & I agree.)
- When Achtung Baby first came out, my friends & I drove around and around and around in our parents’ cars, debating the lyrics, trying to understand how U2 got from the hopeful expansiveness of “Where The Streets Have No Name” to the desperate, soul-crushing loneliness of “Love Is Blindness”. (TL;DR: the Edge’s divorce is how.) If podcasting had been a thing back then, we would have started one. Happily, here in the present, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks binge-listening to some U2-y podcasts, all brought to my attention by lovely DamesPal & Guest Editor Syazwina Saw. The best is this episode of Talking Like a Jerk, in which hosts Lindsay Hogan & Jason Mogavero get all the 100% accurate, furious critiques of the band out of the way at the top so they can then unabashedly praise what’s still so great about them. The silliest is U Talkin’ U2 To Me?, hosted by comedy fellows Adam Scott & Scott Aukerman. These episodes are long, and digressive, and did I mention silly? Very, very silly. And addictive: I’ve already burned through the whole series. I recommend starting with their Rattle & Hum episode, though the episode where they actually interview the band is also a classic. Again: FUN.
- Charming band banter is all my joy, and the YouTube has furnished a trove of such delights, including A day in the life of The Edge (in which Bono wakes Edge up way too early and then suffers the consequences when his night owl bestie is ready to stay up til the very, very wee hours following their show in Miami), this lovely performance & interview on Irish tv’s The Late Late Show,all four of the lads on Graham Norton, and of course, this video for “Electrical Storm”, in which Larry Mullen, Jr. falls in love with a mermaid played by Samantha Morton. I mean, who wouldn’t?
- Ride or Die: these men care about each other so much, something Adam Clayton highlighted in his acceptance speech when he was given the Stevie Ray Vaughan Award from the MusiCares Foundation last month. “We have a pact with each other. In our band, no one will be a casualty. We all come home or none of us come home. No one will be left behind. Thank you for honoring that promise and letting me be in your band.” Excuse me, all the dust in this room has just flown into my eyeballs.
- It’s easy to rattle off a list of contemporary rock acts who owe a sonic debt to U2 — the Killers, Snow Patrol, Airborne Toxic Event (remember them?), Arcade Fire, Imagine Dragons, Coldplay and more — but what about country? This very week, Rolling Stone published a fascinating, in-depth piece about U2’s love for country music, their 90s work with Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Willie Nelson, and their influence on contemporary country. It’s so good!
If you are also experiencing a U2 Renaissance in your heart, please do @ me. I love nothing more than to hear about what leads us back to things we love.
