The song Noel Gallagher thought he should have written: “I could have been there”
There’s no right or wrong to approach songwriting. Although many people like to go the proper route and parse out the theoretical side of things, there are just as many people who just sit back with an acoustic guitar and wait for the ideas to come to them. Noel Gallagher may be upfront when he says he doesn’t know the first thing about music theory, but he admitted that the U2 classic ‘Every Breaking Wave’ was meant to be written by him.
It’s not like Gallagher has exactly exhausted himself when it came to writing songs. Aside from the occasional lift from a Beatles track or taking the odd piece and flipping it around to suit his needs, works like ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Slide Away’ are still going to be here long after he’s gone, continuing to give everyone for a better future than what they have in the present.
The musician hasn’t lost his touch, either. Throughout his most recent output, Gallagher is still as willing to toy with what makes a good song as every other classic songwriter, whether it’s writing with dance textures on ‘Black Star Dancing’ or walking away with a track that can break your heart such as ‘Easy Now’ and ‘Dead to the World’.
His songs all stem from positive emotion, though, and U2 have made that kind of self-belief their calling card for years. While they do have morose pieces in their catalogue, Bono had practically invented an entire persona around his signature brand of optimism, either calling his higher power for help or his strong belief that the world will get better no matter how bleak it is.
Then again, one can only take so much of U2 at a time, and hearing Bono become a self-righteous asshole every now and again has rubbed people the wrong way. Every time he seems to be getting back in the good graces of the public, there’s stuff like Songs of Innocence, where the band made the boneheaded decision of trying to throw their new album on everyone’s phone whether they wanted it or not.
While the musical equivalent of Big Brother took over then, it did have some standout tracks to go around, including ‘Every Breaking Wave’. Considering its tone, this feels like a successor to some of their classic ballads, almost picking up where a song like ‘One’ had left off years before.
Since Gallagher had been conversing with classic songwriters for a while, he said that the track had his fingerprints all over it, saying, “Songs come to me fully formed, and sometimes you catch one, and sometimes you don’t. But you’re not fishing, Bono’s gonna get it, or Chris Martin’s gonna get it. ‘Every Breaking Wave’ on the new U2 record, I was thinking, ‘Wow, I could have been there that day.’”
If Gallagher didn’t get to that track first, he got the next best thing when going out on tour with the band a few years later. Although he was happy to bask in the glory of singing songs like ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, Noel was most likely taking notes. No writer is ever out of their bag of tricks, and working with someone like Bono may as well have been a songwriting course.
