The song only U2 could make: “We never played it again”
In any context, a moment of surrender is the second where you take the leap of faith, resign yourself to fate, and travel wherever life decides to take you. There was nothing more fitting that U2 could have sung about.
Most people credit the band with their earliest successes of the 1980s and ‘90s as their most prolific – after all, nothing compares to the likes of ‘Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ or ‘With or Without You’. But if you are willing to look a little further down the line, you would also find a somewhat hidden gem which embodies U2 at their quintessential best.
That came in 2009 with the release of their 12th studio album, No Line on the Horizon, along with the song ‘Moment of Surrender’. For a track which, in Bono’s newfound groove of writing from other perspectives, focused on a drug addict in crisis, it was perhaps the closest thing the band have ever come to in terms of reaching a true holy grail.
It certainly felt that way to Brian Eno, who produced the album and stood alongside the group every step of the way. Yet when it came to the actual process for ‘Moment of Surrender’, all pretensions of finding oneself and labouring over the music were thrown out the window. It was truly spiritual and simply flowed off the page into the microphone.
According to Eno, the song was “a very strong statement which says, ‘We’re going somewhere different – come along with us’, because the record is really somewhere different,” adding, “Nobody else could have done that, I think.”
Indeed, although those words of wisdom were obviously important, the true essence of the experience was worth far more than strong statements alone.
“It was the most magical experience I’ve ever had in a studio,” Eno recalled, “In that the piece came together incredibly quickly and was only ever played once, which is the version that is on the record. We never played it again.” In such a massive moment as that, with the voices of hymns and gospel choirs all ruminating round the ether, it really was all or nothing.
In many ways, that was obviously perfect for a song called ‘Moment of Surrender’, in the act of giving oneself over to whatever forces the world has in store for them. For all their anthemic qualities, that sense of spectrality and whimsiness was something that U2 were also more than familiar with, and so the combination of their past with that specific present was all the gift they needed.
But ever the true artists of perfection, it fell to Eno’s responsibility to make the band realise the magic they held in their midst, which they would lose if they tampered with the track any further. “These fucking guys, they’re supposed to be so spiritual – they don’t spot a miracle when it hits them in the face,” he later commented. “Nothing like that ever happened to me in the studio in my whole life.”
So Eno got his way, ‘Moment of Surrender’ was left as it was, and U2 became the sonic champions of rock anthems once more. It was a product of toiling over their craft for so many years that the band perhaps didn’t initially comprehend what they had, but on the other hand, only they could create an act of genius without even realising it.
