The one song Bono has been trying to recreate “all my life”
It’s a special feeling when a song arrives that speaks directly about your life. For U2 frontman Bono, this happened as a teenager, and to this day, he’s still searching for his own version of it.
For most people, the first music that they fall in love with is a gateway drug to new musical discoveries, and they soon get over their first love. However, for Bono, it was The Beatles who opened his eyes to the world of music, which sparked an infatuation that has only grown stronger with the maturity of age.
Their early single ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was Bono’s “earliest memory of music“. Whenever he hears it now, it still transports him back to his late father mowing the lawn at their family home. Although on the surface it’s just a pop song, for the U2 frontman, it’s a portal to his childhood and a reminder of happy times.
Bono relates to Paul McCartney and John Lennon on a deeper level, too. Tragically, like the two Beatles members, he lost his mother at a young age, which had a devastating impact. The vocalist was 14 when she unexpectedly passed away after suffering a brain aneurysm. In his memoir, he explained how she was never spoken about again in the Hewson home following her death, which made his grief an unspoken taboo.
“We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her,” Bono wrote.
Similarly, while Lennon and McCartney may have all been reserved about their grief in a familial setting, it spilt out of them once they sat down to write songs, which, in turn, gave Bono a source of comfort.
One such example is Lennon’s solo song, ‘Mother‘, which instantly connected with Bono. In an open letter written to John Lennon’s son Julian in 2020, Bono explained his love of the song, as well as revealing that he views it as the pinnacle of songwriting.
He began by writing: “All the Beatles solo work has held me at one time or another,” as well as telling Julian, “I know you know these songs will be with us forever.”
Bono continued by noting his love of Paul and Linda McCartney’s album Ram and The Beatles track ‘Let It Be’. The latter was inspired by McCartney being visited in a dream by his late mother, which Bono highlighted before discussing the song Lennon wrote about a similar subject matter.
He added: “But on the mothers front, John Lennon really went there with MOTHER… and that must have hurt a long time before healing. If he’d have made it into his 40’s he’d have followed you around with pride the way you did him.”
The frontman concluded by writing: “I’ve been writing a version of this song all my life… so many rock’n’rollers write from a place of abandonment to a place of abandonment… in hip hop it’s often the father but in rock it’s often enough the mother, even if the mother just passes away too early for adolescence to wear itself out, and so it continues”.
As Bono said, the loss of his mother at such an early age remains an inescapable part of his life that he can only navigate through the aid of songwriting. With U2, Bono has written a handful of songs on the heartbreaking subject matter, most notably on ‘Iris (Hold Me Close)’, his equivalent to ‘Mother’. While the grief has never left him, songwriting has helped alleviate some pain and express his feelings, just like it did with Lennon.
