Bono discusses the rock song that broke all of the rules: “That extraordinary baroque voice”
Every musician is typically looking for songs that are off the beaten path to some extent. Most writers have written millions of songs that sound like them, but once they hit upon a tune that sounds like nothing else, that’s something to nurture until it is one of the best things that they have ever created. Although U2 have never been afraid of taking different strange detours throughout their career, Bono can only look to the giants of old for tips on how to take music into a new place.
Then again, there have been many instances where U2 have played it too safe as well. It’s easy to excuse a few albums that are lacklustre, but even if some of their later output didn’t quite hit the mark in the same way that Achtung Baby did back in the day, seeing them swallowing their own tale when making some of their updated versions of their material on Songs of Surrender makes them sound like they are getting being outrun by snails.
But having a homogenised sound wasn’t always a bad thing for rock and roll artists. Even though The Beatles helped open doors for how many different genres could fit inside one group, Chuck Berry and Little Richard were exceptionally good at their one trick and managed to keep the audiences entertained no matter what story they were trying to tell.
Even by the standards of rock and roll, though, Roy Orbison was a bit of a different beast. The whole point behind rock was to have something that sounded a little bit darker than the typical sounds of rock and roll, but Orbison had the same croon that you’d expect out of an opera singer, and when he sang tracks like ‘Only The Lonely’ or ‘Oh Pretty Woman’, he was practically putting on a mini soap opera within the span of a few minutes.
But ‘In Dreams’ exists in a weird space in his catalogue. There isn’t as much of a linear structure as you’d expect out of the typical rock and roll songs of the day, but listening to him pour his heart out feels like him laying out different musical moments throughout the track listing and letting the listener in on the darker shades of his heart.
While Bono was first introduced to the song on the soundtrack to Blue Velvet, he remembered feeling some spectral power listening to Orbison croon over the song, saying, “One night when I couldn’t sleep in London, just before we played Wembley Arena, I stayed up listening to this tape… I always seemed to wake up on that song, ‘In Dreams’. And I thought it was the most extraordinary song ‘cos it breaks all the rules of pop music. And then there was that extraordinary baroque voice.”
Then again, Bono was probably taking cues from Orbison without even knowing it at the time. The whole premise of Orbison’s voice was about making every single note feel like the most important thing in the world, and listening to how the U2 frontman shouts out every line of a song like ‘Red Hill Mining Town’, he seems to see the power of the song in the same reverent way that Orbison did.
While ‘In Dreams’ might not have the same avant-garde approach to songwriting as something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ does, it was already serving as a lesson to every songwriter who ever felt stuck in a rut. Even though it wasn’t the most radio-friendly format, Orbison didn’t need to cower to radio guidelines to get audiences to hang on to his every word.
