The two songs Bono claimed to have never finished: “Left as sketches”
One of the biggest challenges any artist faces is completing one of their songs. It’s one thing to have a decent chord progression that sounds cool in isolation, but the final piece, where lyrics are getting written and the melody is finally put into place, is one of the single hardest hurdles for any musician to jump over. While Bono is responsible for some of the greatest hymns of rock and roll, he did admit that the U2 songs like ‘Bad’ and ‘Pride’ never got fleshed out the way that he wanted them to be.
Granted, U2 were going beyond just being an underground act by the late 1980s to worry about intricate lyrics. ‘I Will Follow’ had put them on the charts at first, but once they leaned into their political side, songs like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘New Year’s Day’ were becoming anthems for the next generation wondering where life was going to lead them.
So if War set them up for the next phase of their career, The Unforgettable Fire should have been what solidified it. After all, this album would give them some of their greatest hits, become one of the prominent features of Live Aid, and lay the groundwork for where they would go next once they started sculpting The Joshua Tree.
But having all that time in the studio at your disposal leads to a lot more experimenting, and the Irish legends were more than willing to wiggle a little bit. ‘Elvis Presley and America’ was constructed as a free-form version of a standard U2 tune, but while The Edge was fine-tuning his guitar sound, Bono thought that he should have looked at the bigger picture on some songs.
When discussing how ‘Bad’ and ‘Pride’ came together, Bono still thinks that they were criminally underwritten by his standards, recalling, “The lyrics weren’t really up to much because Brian, Danny [Lanois] and Edge weren’t very interested in lyrics. They wanted to preserve my Bongolese. And I, like an idiot, went along with it, and so I never finished great songs like ‘Bad.’ Classics like ‘Pride In The Name Of Love’ are left as simple sketches.”
Then again, pairing things down isn’t always a bad thing. It might be harder to decipher what someone’s getting at when they are fumbling around for the right words, but since they had pulled off meandering melodies beautifully on the last record with ‘Drowning Man’, who’s to say it couldn’t work again?
Looking into ‘Pride’, there are a few concerns that Bono probably was right to have. The music is among U2’s best, and the stirring tribute to Martin Luther King Jr is absolutely beautiful, but if it had just a little more time to marinade, maybe one of the group would have realised that King was murdered in the afternoon, so the lyric ‘Early morning April 4’ doesn’t really make any sense.
Still, if limiting themselves led to tracks like ‘Bad’, maybe they should do it a little more often. After all, most legacy acts have fallen victim to overthinking their albums and playing it too safe, so maybe it’s better to just experiment with what you have and see where it takes you rather than arrive with a fully fleshed-out song.
