The song The Edge said all of U2 wanted to redo: “We’d always wanted another go”
Not every band can get what they hear in their head down on to tape whenever they walk into the studio. Some of the biggest records of all time might sound immense, but there’s a good chance that the musicians behind them are still kicking themselves, wondering what they could have done better if they only had a few more hours, adding the right guitar part or changing a word here or there. While most of U2’s records could be considered masterpieces throughout the 1980s, The Edge knew that the band felt like a few songs warranted being played a little bit better when compiling their old material.
For anyone associated with the band, though, many of U2’s records are never truly finished. The whole point behind their records is to capture a moment in time, and while that might be magical when making a record like The Joshua Tree, there are countless times when the songs weren’t right for the time or sounded completely dated when looking back on them, like when Bono decided to release a difficult album with October.
By the time of The Unforgettable Fire, though, they had their sound down to a science. The Edge was beginning to hit his stride as a sonic architect with his effects, and every moment that Bono belted out a chorus, it felt like he was trying to shake the world every time he opened his mouth. So, for a band that was as ingrained in the world of stadium rock, making something a bit softer would have been a gamble.
That’s not to say that everything they made was heavy. They certainly had their moments like ‘Bullet the Blue Sky,’ but no one’s going to say that a song like ‘With Or Without You’ is one of the most intense feats of musical brilliance or anything. When Bono decided to lay down the basis for ‘Sweetest Thing,’ though, it didn’t seem to have as much meat on its bones compared to everything else during The Joshua Tree era.
“This seemed like the obvious time to try and finish it off”
the edge
But that was never what it was supposed to be. The whole track is as simple a love song as U2 can muster, and considering how Bono’s melody jumps up and down, it sounds closer to something that would have come out of Motown had it been released a few decades earlier. It was a change of pace, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t some loose ends that could have been tied up.
When making their greatest hits record, The Edge remembered the entire band wanting to take another stab at the track, saying, “We’d always wanted to have another go at it, and this opportunity presented itself. When we were thinking about what we were going to put on the collection, this seemed like the obvious time to try and finish it off [and] give Bono a chance to re-sing it, because he was always upset about his vocal. The day he originally sang it, he had lost his voice, and it was quite an unusual vocal.”
Still, it’s strange how the flawed version sounds better than what the band redid. Bono’s pitchiness after losing his voice is palpable. It is enough to hurt someone’s throat, but since the whole song is almost desperate in how head over heels he is for his other half, sounding wounded and vulnerable like that feels like the right approach compared to the perfect take.
After all, that’s always been the cardinal rule of all good rock and roll. U2 could have taken as many stabs as they wanted to to get the one magical take right for the song, but some of the best parts of any rock and roll anthem are the imperfections and the spaces between the notes.
