U2's 50 Greatest Songs (2024)

“40”

Bono took this lyric from one of his key influences: King David, who wrote the Psalms. “I was always interested in the character of David in the Bible because he was such a screw-up. It’s a great amusem*nt to me that the people God chose to use in the Scriptures were all liars, cheaters, adulterers, murderers. I don’t know which of those activities I was involved in at the time, but I certainly related to David. I was writing my psalm.” U2’s version of Psalm 40 (“I waited patiently for the Lord”) gave War its big finale and became one of their trusty concert-closing singalongs.

“Numb”

This unique U2 single began as a discarded track from Achtung Baby called “Down All the Days.” “It’s this quite unhinged electronic backing track with a very traditional melody and lyrics,” said the Edge when “Down” reappeared on Achtung Baby‘s 20th-anniversary reissue. “It almost worked.” What made it work as “Numb” was replacing Bono’s melody with the Edge’s deadpan rapping and lots of errant noises and samples. “What we’re trying to do is re-create that feeling of sensory overload,” said Bono. “So you hear a football crowd, a line of ‘don’t’s, kitsch soul singing and Larry singing [background vocals] for the first time in that context.”

“Acrobat”

“It’s an unusual time signature for us,” said the Edge of Achtung Baby‘s penultimate track. “It’s like a 6/8 almost, which is a very Irish time signature. It’s used in a lot of traditional Irish music, but in rock & roll you don’t really hear it that much.” Though the Edge spent the run-up to the dance-centric Achtung Baby absorbing the industrial sounds of bands like KMFDM and Einstürzende Neubauten, this song’s rhythm is actually driven by an atypically busy performance from Mullen, who’d been listening to the classic rock of Cream and Jimi Hendrix. The result is a quintessential U2 mix of tradition and innovation.

“North and South of the River”

When Bono wrote “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” he
was an angry 22-year-old. But 15 years later, when he penned this somber reflection
on the conflict in Northern Ireland, he was more interested in pleading than
shouting. “There was a badness that had its way,” he sang. “But
love wasn’t lost, love will have its day.” Originally buried as a B side
to 1997’s “Staring at the Sun,” this sad ode to peace got its
definitive version on Irish TV in 1998, when U2 played a tribute show to the
victims of a recent terrorist bombing.

“Sweetest Thing”

“Sweetest Thing” began as Bono’s apology to
his wife, Ali, for spending her birthday in the studio, but it became so much
more. After releasing it as a B side to “Where the Streets Have No Name,”
the band gave it a face-lift with rejiggered vocals and new guitar textures for
a 1998 best-of compilation. U2 also made a video for the song that featured
Bono wooing Ali. After albums like Pop and Zooropa, it signaled a
songful return to form, paving the way for All That You Can’t Leave Behind. “It’s
pop as it should be – not produced out of existence, but pop produced with a
real intimacy and purity,” the Edge said.

“Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”

Co-produced by British trip-hop artist Nellee
Hooper, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” dates back to the Zooropa
sessions – on the album’s cover, it’s referred to in distorted purple
letters spelling “ISSMEKILLM.” It emerged in 1995 as the lead single
from the Batman Forever soundtrack – a rare move into blockbuster work
for Bono and the Edge, who had previously done music for artier films by directors
like Wim Wenders and Robert Altman. Though Bono originally balked at the idea,
the Edge said, “I figured it’d be good for us to be involved in something
that’s basically throwaway and lighthearted.” The gamble paid off, and it
ended up a bigger hit than anything off Zooropa, thanks to a track that
gave their Nineties dance flavors a woozily anthemic feel. Bono sings, “They’ll
want their money back/If you’re alive at 33.” On the PopMart tour, the
band made stark reference to the dark side of fame by projecting Warhol-esque
images of celebrities, many of whom had died young, including Jim Morrison, Ian
Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur.

“No Line on the Horizon”

U2 began work on what would become No Line onthe Horizon in 2006 with veteran producer Rick Rubin. But when those sessions proved unsuccessful, they soon returned to their longtime collaborators Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, traveling to Morocco to began recording as a six-piece band. They nailed the album’s pulsating title track – about a “girl, a hole in her heart” – in a single take. “It’s very raw and very to the point,” the Edge told Rolling Stone. “It’s rock & roll 2009.” Said Bono, “You could have called this album ‘The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress,’ because all the characters are struggling to stay true to their values or want to realize their potential.”

“Lemon”

“‘Lemon’ started out as a disco tune until Brian Eno got through with it,” said Zooropa engineer Flood about this propulsive dance track, a showcase for Bono’s falsetto. Flood credited Eno for coming up with chilly Talking Heads–esque background vocals, “making it a very bizarre folk song.” “Lemon” was originally written and recorded with a drum machine, though Flood ultimately decided to use Mullen’s live drums instead. In contrast to the upbeat art-rock feel, lyrically it was inspired by the “strange experience to receive, in the post, from a very distant relative, early Super 8 footage of my mother,” said Bono, “aged 24, younger than me, playing a game of rounders in slow motion.”

“In a Little While”

When Bono came up with the understated, soul-kissed “In a Little While,” he thought he’d written a simple little tune about stumbling home after a night out drinking and facing the inevitable hangover to come (“Friday night running/To Sunday on my knees”). But the song took on a new meaning when Joey Ramone died of cancer only a year after its release; the singer was a huge U2 fan who loved All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and he had been listening to “In a Little While” in the hospital during his final moments. “Joey turned this song about a hangover into a gospel song,” Bono said later. “That’s the way I always hear it now, through Joey Ramone’s ears.”

“Volcano”

For 2014’s Songs of Innocence, U2 created a concept album based on their experiences growing up in Dublin. “We wanted to make a very personal album,” Bono told Rolling Stone. “Let’s try to figure out why we wanted to be in a band, the relationships around the band, our friendships, our lovers, our family. The whole album is first journeys – first journeys geographically, spiritually, sexually. And that’s hard. But we went there.” “Volcano,” which kicks off with a throbbing bass hook written by the Edge, taps the anger Bono felt as a teenager until he joined his band. “You were alone,” he sings. “But now you are rock & roll.”

“Love Is Blindness”

This pulsating, celestial-effects ballad, the concluding track on Achtung Baby, wasn’t originally intended for U2; Bono wrote the song (on piano, which he rarely did) with R&B-soul diva Nina Simone in mind before U2 kept it for themselves. The Edge has said the song has “probably one of Bono’s finest lyrics”; the reference to “a little death,” Bono has said, “can be taken to mean a faint during org*sm but also works as an image of terrorism. … I was mixing up the personal and the political.” The personal factored into the music as well: Recording his solo, the Edge, who was separating from his wife, “played until the strings came off,” Bono said.

“Luminous Times (Hold On to Love)”

A testament to the creative roll U2 were on during the Joshua Tree sessions, this excellent, darkly roiling song about love’s addictive power ended up on the cutting-room floor. (A demo version was used as the B side to “With or Without You.”) The band recorded it without the help of either Brian Eno or Daniel Lanois, arriving at something closer to the shadowy expressionist charge of arty European punk than American blues or gospel. Though “Luminous Times” was never fully completed, the Edge told Eno, “I think this is as good as anything on the album.”

“The Electric Co.”

“The Electric Co.” raged about a friend who’d been tortured with electroshock therapy at a Dublin psychiatric hospital. It was a high point on U2’s 1980 debut, Boy, with reverb-crazed guitar steeped in Public Image Ltd or Echo and the Bunnymen, as well as the “boy” refrain that gave the album its title. Onstage, Bono often threw in a snippet of Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” which turned out to be an expensive habit when U2 released it on Under a Blood Red Sky before clearing the rights. (The snippet was cut from later editions.) Bono began replacing “Send in the Clowns” with “Amazing Grace” – a much cheaper option.

“Drowning Man”

“It was the title of a Sam Beckett–style play I’d started about a drowning man,” Bono said about this handsome, haunting piece. But in gestures the absurdist Irish writer might’ve appreciated, there’s no mention of a drowning man anywhere in the lyrics, which conflate romantic and spiritual love, and crib lines from the Bible (Isaiah: 40, to be precise). Etched with the Edge’s acoustic-guitar strokes and capped with a Middle Eastern–flavored violin flourish, the dazzling music points toward the ambitious tapestries of The Joshua Tree; the Edge described the final version as “perfection. It’s one of the most successful pieces of recording we’ve ever done.”

“Desire”

Drawing inspiration from the Stooges’ raucous,
proto-punk classic “1969” (hardly the stuff of hit singles in 1988),
Bono and the Edge wrote a song that made the Billboard Top Five and earned U2
one of their first Grammys. Bono has said the tune displayed “the
religiosity of rock & roll concerts” as well as his own “lust for
success.” Driven by a thunderous Bo Diddley rumble and capped off with
Bono’s searing harmonica solo, it provided a sharp contrast to the uplifting
expansiveness of The Joshua Tree, let alone anything else on the radio. “I
liked the fact that it was totally not what people were listening to,” the
Edge has said. “It was a rock & roll record – not a pop song.”

“Until the End of the World”

This dense, tribal-stomp track – which Bono described as being inspired by “a conversation between Jesus and Judas” – defines U2’s nothing-is-simple dictum when writing songs. Bono initiated the riff for a song called “Fat Boy,” but it didn’t go anywhere – until the Edge picked up on it and refashioned the part as the band’s contribution to the soundtrack for Wim Wenders’ film Until the End of the World. Not only did the re-recorded, revved-up new version wind up on U2’s own album as well, but, as the Edge has said, “We told Wim, ‘You can have it, but we want it too. … By the way, we’re borrowing your title!'”

“Gone”

“I’ve written a song now that’s like a
two-finger salute to the people who tried to foist a sense of guilt on us
because we’re successful,” Bono said. “The thing is, we always wanted
to be one of the biggest bands in the world.” On “Gone,” he
takes on the price of fame (“You get to feel so guilty/Got so much for so
little”) over guitar that’s like a drill boring into glass. “The
sounds that a guitar is capable of creating are, at this point, cliché,”
the Edge said. “The challenge is to find things you can do with the
instrument that are not already used up.” On the PopMart Tour, “Gone”
was occasionally dedicated to late INXS vocalist Michael Hutchence. Said Bono
at one show, “Going … going … but never gone.”

“Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”

Bono was a close friend of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, and the singer’s 1997 suicide impacted him very deeply. On the soulful “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” Bono carries on a conversation that he never got to have with his departed friend. “I just knew that if Michael had hung around an extra half an hour, he would have been OK,” Bono said. “I feel the biggest respect I could pay to him was not to write some stupid, soppy f*ckin’ song. So I wrote a really tough, nasty little number, slapping him around the head. And I’m sorry, but that’s how it came out of me.”

“City of Blinding Lights”

U2 began work on “City of Blinding Lights” during the Pop sessions, but they didn’t get around to finishing it until How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb seven years later. Bono’s lyrics were inspired by his first trip to London with his wife, when they were teenagers, and the band’s first trip to New York, in 1980. “It’s an area of Bono’s lyric writing that I really like,” the Edge said. “It’s cinematic, conjuring up a place and time. New York is a city that really brings you somewhere, a state of mind.” The song got a second life when Barack Obama used it during campaign events in 2008.

“Discothèque”

“We had a great life, we’re listening to a lot of dance music, staying up all night,” Bono told Rolling Stone. “We’re young, our friends around. It was just a wonderful time, and
we tried to capture this in songs like ‘Discothèque.'” As the first single
from 1997’s Pop, “Discothèque” was the initial volley for the
band’s brief late-Nineties foray into electronic music, perhaps the most
polarizing moment of U2’s career. The song – which Bono called an “earnest
little riddle about love … just disguised as trash” – came equipped with a
brittle techno feel and a music video where the band dressed up like the
Village People. “We’re actually trying to make a kind of music that doesn’t
exist yet,” Bono said of U2’s new sound. “That is a terrifying place
to be.” His trepidation was not unwarranted: Reception to the bold change
was mixed (“U2 sounded inspired,” said The New York Times. “Now
it sounds expensive”); and though Pop debuted at Number One, it
fell out of the Top 10 three weeks later, leading some to believe U2 had lost
their commercial instincts. “We don’t just live in the U.S.,” Bono
told Rolling Stone. “It was Number One in 28 countries. I can’t believe
people think that’s not enough. What do they want from us?”

“Breathe”

This searing, cathartic song from No Line on the Horizon originally had two competing sets of lyrics: one about Nelson Mandela and the other a more personal tale of redemption inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses. The second version ultimately won out. Co-producer Brian Eno estimated the song went through 80 incarnations in the studio. Live, it was a nightly highlight of the 360 ̊ Tour, even as many other songs from No Line fell by the wayside. “There’s this theme running through the album of surrender and devotion and all the things I find really difficult,” Bono said. “All music for me is worship of one kind or another.”

“11 O’clock Tick Tock”

U2’s third single, made with legendary Joy Division producer Martin Hannett, came out in May 1980 – just weeks before the death of Ian Curtis. As longtime U2 comrade Gavin Friday recalled, “Martin Hannett was like a Womble from hell, smoking spliffs: his hair, the smoke and this extraordinary sound.” Even a hardened pro like Hannett was taken aback by how raw U2 were. “He was scratching his head and complaining to Edge that the rhythm section couldn’t play in time,” Clayton said of Hannett. “And that’s pretty much true.” The definitive live version, recorded in Boston, came out in 1983 on Under aBlood Red Sky.

“Ultra Violet (Light My Way)”

U2 had so many ideas going into Achtung Baby that one early creation, “Ultra Violet,” wound up being split in two – half of it became “The Fly,” and the other half mutated into this often-overlooked gem. Brian Eno wrote about the song’s “helicopter-ish melancholy,” a phrase that captures both its fluttering majesty and desperation. The lyrics seem to describe a relationship, with Bono insistently repeating the word “baby” – the first time he’d ever sung that word on a U2 song. Said producer Flood, “There was a good deal of laughter about Bono coming out and going ‘baby.'”

“The Unforgettable Fire”

“It was a soundtrack piece I’d been messing around with on the piano at home,” said the Edge of this powerfully atmospheric, multilayered song, which weaves together multiple verse and chorus melodies – “It’s classical, almost.” The title was taken from an exhibit of the same name at Chicago’s Peace Museum, a collection of art by survivors of the U.S. bombings of Japan during World War II that left a strong impression on the band. The song, a favorite of Bono’s father, is “very evocative of a city, in this case Tokyo,” said the singer, “coming like a phoenix out of the ash.” But it’s also a love song, with lyrics – “your eyes, as black as coals” – that may refer to Bono’s wife, Ali.

“Vertigo”

The Edge listened to a lot of the Buzzco*cks, the Sex Pistols and the Who when U2 began work on 2004’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and the influence of those raging guitar bands is very clear on the lead single. “It’s just a great, visceral rock & roll song,” the Edge said. “It’s very simple: drums, one guitar, one bass and the vocals.” Bono’s lyrics were inspired by a vision of an awful nightclub, and the famous intro cry of “Uno, dos, trés, catorce” (which translates to “1, 2, 3, 14”) had a similar origin. “There may have been some drinking involved,” Bono said in 2004.

“All I Want Is You”

One of Bono’s most heartfelt love songs, the glimmering ballad “All I Want Is You” is a tender tribute to his wife, Ali. “That’s a song about commitment,” he said. The Edge worked out its pensive chord progression around the same time he and Bono wrote “Desire,” but it took the cinematic string arrangements of Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks to push the song over the top. (Edge called Parks’ contribution “haunting” and “gorgeous.”) “‘All I Want Is You’ is probably the best of what we were trying to do with [Rattle and Hum], in that it has a traditional basis, but it was a truly U2 song,” the Edge said.

“Stay (Faraway, So Close!)”

The spare, elegant sound of Zooropa‘s third and final single was a successful attempt at a tribute to Frank Sinatra. “I mean, no one is going to mistake us for Frank Sinatra’s backing band,” said Clayton. “A very humble little combo sound is what we ended up with, and that really worked.” The song originated in the Achtung Baby sessions, and was revived when German filmmaker Wim Wenders needed a title track to his 1993 movie Faraway, So Close! “The film was about angels who want to be human and want to be on Earth,” said Bono. “But to do so, they have to become mortal. That was a great image to play with – the impossibility of wanting something like this, and then the cost of having it.”

“Mofo”

“We spent months farting around with it,” said Clayton about “Mofo.” “And then we said to Flood, ‘Let’s hip-hop it, let’s strip it back, let’s get a beat together, let’s see where it goes.'” They ended up with the hardest-hitting electronica experiment on 1997’s Pop, big-beat techno redolent of contemporary acts like the Crystal Method and the Future Sound of London. But while the music shot toward the future, Bono mined his past. “It was as if my whole life was in that song,” he said. “It was extraordinary playing ‘Mofo’ live. The song would come to a shuddering halt, and there I was, just speaking to my mother in front of 50,000 of my closest friends.”

“A Sort of Homecoming”

The opening track of The Unforgettable Fire – U2’s first collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois – was worked up in
Bono’s actual home, a converted 19th-century Martello defense tower on the
Irish coast. Fittingly, the song feels like a military march, albeit one
ascending into heaven. It was inspired by the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan,
who – like U2 – wrestled with notions of spiritual faith in his work, and who
famously described poems as paths “for projecting ourselves into the
search for ourselves. … A kind of homecoming.” Above the Edge’s guitar
abstractions are some of Bono’s most potent verses, a paddle wheel of images,
pledges and chants that conjure a ravaged battlefield of the heart. “A lot
of rock & roll is banal ideas well-executed,” Bono humble-brags. “Whereas
I think a lot of what we do is really very interesting ideas, badly executed. ‘A
Sort of Homecoming’ involved a lot of very interesting ideas, well-executed.”
U2 superfan Chris Martin concurred: “I know [it] backward and
forward. … It’s so rousing, brilliant and beautiful. It’s one of the first
songs I played to my unborn baby.”

“Bullet the Blue Sky”

In 1986, Bono and his wife, Ali, traveled to El Salvador, which was then in the midst of a horrific civil war. There, they witnessed firsthand the brutality of the U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including the sight of F-16 fighters attacking civilian villages. When Bono returned to Ireland and the Joshua Tree sessions, he instructed the Edge to “put El Salvador through your amplifier.” The result was incisive and explosive, with a heavy, tumultuous sound that recalled Led Zeppelin and lyrics that dug into the darkest aspects of American imperialism and racism. “I love America and I hate it,” Bono said. “I’m torn between the two.”

“Out of Control”

U2 were still in their teens when they introduced themselves with “Out of Control” – the song was written on Bono’s 18th birthday. But they were already earnest young men, brooding over childhood angst with lines like “Monday morning/Eighteen years of dawning.” It appeared on their debut release in September 1979, a three-song seven- and 12-inch that cracked the Top 20 of the Irish singles charts. Like a lot of the tunes on Boy, it echoes the goth punk of bands like Joy Division or Siouxsie and the Banshees. Bono once mused, “I would like to do that album again, if nothing else to stop singing like Siouxsie Sioux.”

“Running to Stand Still”

In an essay Bono wrote for Rolling Stone to honor the late Lou Reed in 2013, he cited “Running to Stand Still” as “redhanded proof” of U2’s debt to the hugely influential musician. Lyrically, it’s one of several U2 songs that take on the subject of addiction. Opening with a Delta-steeped slide guitar, the song turns into a fragile benediction with a melody similar to Reed’s Velvet Underground classic “Heroin.” “Running to Stand Still” was improvised almost whole-cloth live in the studio; producer Daniel Lanois later recalled “a really wonderful communication happening in the room at that time.” Said the Edge, it’s “amazing in one go to get that much of a song.”

“Gloria”

The greatest rock anthem ever sung in Latin? EcceBono! In the early days of
MTV, “Gloria” was the video hit that put U2 on the map for American
kids; in this 1981 clip, the startlingly young lads jam on a barge in Dublin’s
Grand Canal for a crowd of scruffy locals. On “Gloria,” Bono wails
about teen religious fervor (“Gloria in te domine“), with a
nod to Patti Smith’s 1975 reinvention of Van Morrison’s Sixties classic, while
the Edge plays psychedelic slide. The idea to sing in Latin came after
listening to an album of Gregorian chants owned by their manager Paul
McGuinness. “It’s so outrageous at the end, going to the full Latin whack,”
Bono said. “Wonderfully mad and epic and operatic.”

“Walk On”

Inspired by the plight of Burmese political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, “Walk On” is about the strength it takes to make a great sacrifice for a just cause. A section from the song’s spoken-word intro gave U2 the title for one of their most inspirational albums: “And love is not the easy thing/The only baggage you can bring/Is all that you can’t leave behind.” “It is a mantra, really, a bonfire of the vanities,” Bono said. “Whatever it is you want more than love, it has to go.” Aided by a soaring guitar melody (one of the Edge’s best of the 2000s), “Walk On” charted all over the world and won a Grammy for Record of the Year. Live, it became a nightly tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released in 2010.

“Zooropa”

“The opening was the audio equivalent of BladeRunner’s visuals,” said Bono of the gibbering, media-disseminated voices at the beginning of U2’s futurist opus “Zooropa.” “If you closed your eyes, you could see the neon, the giant LED screens advertising all manner of ephemera.” For the track itself, engineer Joe O’Herlihy recorded jams from soundchecks on the Zoo TV Tour, the Edge combed them for backing tracks, producer Flood mixed in bits from a separate studio jam, and Brian Eno added synths. “It was a time when everyone was all indie and gray and dull,” said Bono. “It’s amazing to be walking around these modern cities like Houston or Tokyo – and embracing it.”

“Mysterious Ways”

In 1991, it would have been hard to imagine U2 as anything close to a dance band, but “Mysterious
Ways,” a Top 10 hit from Achtung Baby, proved that was more than
possible. Brian Eno, who played a huge role in their transformation, aptly
described the song as “heavy bottomed and lightheaded.” The track was
built out of Clayton’s swooping bass part, which had been taken from an
unreleased song called “Sick Puppy,” and the rhythms on the finished
track, complemented by co-producer Daniel Lanois’ congas, give the song a swaying
pulse. Bono’s lyrics – an ode to the power of female allure – are as joyful as
he would ever get.

“Please”

Fourteen years after “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” U2 released their second single to address the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland (Mullen’s drumming on the bridge even seems to allude to the 1983 hit). Producer Howie B, who Mullen called U2’s “disco guru,” had taken the band to dance clubs to help usher in their electronica experiment Pop. For “Please,” he played them a beat rooted in a loop of Mullen’s drums from the sessions for another Pop tune, “If God Will Send His Angels.” Bono constructed a melody, and the song promptly fell into place. “Once the band got it, boom,” said Howie B. Bono called it “a mad prayer of a tune.”

“Every Breaking Wave”

Fourteen years after “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” U2 released their second single to address the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland (Mullen’s drumming on the bridge even seems to allude to the 1983 hit). Producer Howie B, who Mullen called U2’s “disco guru,” had taken the band to dance clubs to help usher in their electronica experiment Pop. For “Please,” he played them a beat rooted in a loop of Mullen’s drums from the sessions for another Pop tune, “If God Will Send His Angels.” Bono constructed a melody, and the song promptly fell into place. “Once the band got it, boom,” said Howie B. Bono called it “a mad prayer of a tune.”

“Pride (In the Name of Love)”

This anthem of resistance and love was inspired by a
biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (Let the Trumpet Sound) given to
Bono by Rolling Stone writer Jim Henke. The soaring melody and chords popped
out during a soundcheck in Hawaii; Bono described the lyrics as just a “simple
sketch.” But it took flight in one of the band’s first recordings with
Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders added
stirring backing vocals. Before a late-Eighties concert in Arizona, Bono
received a threat that he’d be killed if he sang the song. He sang it anyway.

“New Year’s Day”

“New Year’s Day” was U2’s breakthrough, complete with a video where they ride horses through the snow. (The Edge later admitted it was actually four women with scarves over their faces riding those horses.) The surprising musical inspiration: Clayton trying to figure out Visage’s New Romantic disco hit “Fade to Grey.” But “New Year’s Day” was a salute to Polish union leader Lech Walesa, jailed in December 1981, when the government outlawed his Solidarity movement. (In 1990, Walesa became Poland’s first democratically elected president.) “At the same time, it’s a love song,” Bono said. “Love is always strongest when it’s set against a struggle.”

“Even Better Than the Real Thing”

Originally conceived around the same session as 1988’s “Desire” – and based around a riff the Edge called “about as close as we could or would ever want to get to the Rolling Stones” – the song, first called “The Real Thing,” was transformed during the sessions for Achtung Baby. Starting with its whirring-siren intro, the track took on a shadowy, throbbing energy, driven by the Edge’s effects pedal. Bono said his lyrics were “reflective of the times we were living in, when people were no longer looking for the truth. We are all looking for instant gratification.”

“I Will Follow”

“It’s coming from a very dark place,” Bono said of the opening track – and crowning moment – on U2’s debut, noting that it was inspired by “real anger and an enormous sense of
yearning.” Written about the love between a son and his mother (Bono’s
died when he was a teen), it gave stomping U.K. post-punk a heraldic urgency. “I
remember picking up Edge’s guitar and playing the two-stringed chord … to show
the others the aggression I wanted,” Bono recalled. “The percussion
in the drop was a bicycle spinning, wheels upside down and played like a harp
with a kitchen fork.” “I Will Follow” quickly became their live
trump card; the Edge recalled a Boston gig where they played it three times, as
set opener, closer and encore, to a rapturous crowd. “We left the stage
feeling incredible.”

“Moment of Surrender”

The standout track from U2’s 2009 album, No Line
on the Horizon, and the song that ended nearly every show of their two-year
U2 360 ̊ stadium odyssey, is a seven-and-a-half-minute meditation on addiction.
(The term “moment of surrender” is Alcoholics Anonymous lingo for the
instant in which an addict admits helplessness.) “The character in the
song is a junkie, so that’s where I got it,” Bono told Rolling Stone in
2009. “I know a lot of people who have had to deal with demons in
courageous ways. Maybe there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Wow, I’m just an inch
away.'” Producer Daniel Lanois, who has struggled with his own addiction
issues in the past, came up with the chorus melody. The rest of the song was
written during an impromptu jam, with the band improvising the version that
ended up on the album out of thin air in one take. “That spirit blows
through every now and then,” Bono told Rolling Stone as U2 were preparing
to release No Line on the Horizon. “It’s a very strange feeling. We’re
waiting for God to walk into the room – and God, it turns out, is very
unreliable.”

“With or Without You”

“It doesn’t sound like anything else of its time,”
the Edge said of the first single from The Joshua Tree. “It’s not
coming from an Eighties mentality. It’s coming from somewhere completely
different.” With its stark sound and low-key video, “With or Without
You” cut through the bloat and slickness of Eighties rock (“It
whispers its way into the world,” Bono said), giving U2 their first Number
One hit in the U.S. and turning the band into reluctant pop stars. “You
don’t imagine hearing it [on the radio],” Clayton said. “Maybe in a
church.” The song’s lyrics were sparked by heroes of the U.S. civil rights
movement and the “new journalism” of the 1960s. Yet “With or
Without You” – rooted in a simple bass groove and an ethereal guitar that
frames Bono’s yearning vocals – remains one of U2’s most universal songs to
date, a meditation on the painful ambivalence of a love affair. Bono insisted
it was “about how I feel in U2 at times: exposed. I know that the group
thinks I’m exposed and that I give myself away. I think if I do any damage to
U2, it’s that I’m too open.”

“Where the Streets Have No Name”

Opening with nearly two minutes of the Edge’s shimmering guitar, the first song on The
Joshua Tree is an evocation of freedom at its most open-ended. The Edge
came up with the basic track in his home studio, with the finished product
growing out of a characteristically painstaking process that proved so trying,
co-producer Brian Eno later said half the time recording the album was spent on
that song. “We had this giant blackboard with the arrangement written on
it,” Daniel Lanois told Rolling Stone. “I felt like a science
professor conducting them.” Bono later said, “It contains a very
powerful idea. You can call it ‘soul’ or ‘imagination,’ the place where you
glimpse God, your potential, whatever.” For its iconic video, an homage to
the Beatles’ final performance, the band played atop a Los Angeles liquor
store, tying up traffic for hours. “It’s been ripped off hundreds of
times,” recalled director Meiert Avis. “But the excitement comes from
the rebellion; the taste of freedom lights up the fans and the band.”

“Bad”

“Bad” is a powerful song about a painful
subject. Bono wrote it to address the rampant heroin abuse that was crippling
recession-plagued Dublin during the early Eighties, basing his lyrics on the
experiences of people he knew personally. “I’ve always had a real respect
for responsible people,” Bono said, discussing the song. “But I also
have a real respect for irresponsible people. There is that side of me that
wants to run.” The hypnotic, Velvet Underground–inspired track took just
three takes to record, with Brian Eno adding keyboards and minimal overdubs.
But “Bad” really took off live as a surging communal hymn; radio DJs
have been choosing the version on the 1985 concert EP Wide Awake in America over
the studio version for decades, and the triumphant 12-minute version U2 played
at Live Aid in 1985 (during which Bono brought a woman out of the crowd and
danced with her) became one of the festival’s most memorable moments. Recalled
Adam Clayton, “It’s only after six months of touring it and talking to
different people that you get to the inner truths of the song.”

“Sunday Bloody Sunday”

“There’s been a lot of talk about this next song,”
Bono famously tells the crowd in the version of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
that appeared in Live: Under a Blood Red Sky. “Maybe too much talk.”
It was a new level of ambition for U2: “We were trying to be the Who meets
the Clash,” Bono later said. His inspiration: the 1972 massacre when
English soldiers shot and killed 14 unarmed protesters in the Northern Irish
town of Derry. “We realize the potential for division in a song like that,”
the Edge told a journalist. “So all we can say is that we’re trying to
confront the subject rather than sweep it under the carpet.” It wasn’t the
first song about Bloody Sunday – John Lennon and Paul McCartney both had
protest records in stores before 1972 was over. But U2 made it a grand
statement of militant Christian pacifism, with Larry Mullen Jr.’s martial
drums, violin from Steve Wickham – a stranger the Edge met at a Dublin bus stop
– and Bono waving a white flag onstage. As Bono told Rolling Stone at the time,
“I’m not interested in politics like people fighting back with sticks and
stones, but in the politics of love.”

“Beautiful Day”

After spending the Nineties creating music that didn’t
sound anything like the anthemic albums that had won U2 a massive audience
during the Eighties, the band decided to kick off the 2000s by getting back to
basics. “There was a big debate over the guitar sound on ‘Beautiful Day,'”
the Edge said. “That was really the sound of U2, the sound we made our own
and abandoned. Whether or not we should bring it back became a real talking
point.” The group ultimately combined an unmistakable stripped-down sound
with co-producer Brian Eno’s electronic flourishes, and Bono wrote a set of
lyrics about the importance of embracing painful moments that were inspired by
Australian preacher John Smith. “He talked to me about how depression is a
nerve end,” said Bono. “Pain is evidence of life.” “Beautiful
Day” exploded onto radio in late 2000; it won U2 a Grammy for Song of the
Year and helped their transcendent comeback album All That You Can’t Leave
Behind win Record of the Year. When Bono accepted one of the awards, he
said the band was “reapplying for the job of the best band in the world.”

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

“The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God,” Bono told Rolling Stone. U2’s second Number One single revels in ambivalence – “an anthem of doubt more than faith,” Bono has called it. The song was typical of the arduous sessions that went into creating The Joshua Tree: Originally called “Under the Weather,” it began, like most U2 songs, as a jam. “It sounded to me a little like ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ played by a reggae band,” the Edge recalled. “It had this great beat,” producer Daniel Lanois said. “I remember humming a traditional melody in Bono’s ear. He said, ‘That’s it! Don’t sing any more!’ – and went off and wrote the melody as we know it.” The song’s lyrics were full of religious allusions, classic images steeped in the tradition of American gospel music that the band filled with new meaning and purpose. “I was rooting around for a sense of the traditional and then trying to twist it a bit,” Bono told the magazine in 1987. “That’s the idea of ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.'”

“One”