“A giant of songwriting”: the musician The Edge admires most
Every U2 song wasn’t going to make it past the first draft without The Edge looking at it first.
As much as Bono was about the feeling of certain songs whenever he worked on them, The Edge was the perfectionist, trying to be as meticulous as possible until he found the sound that he wanted for any number of songs on the album. If it didn’t work, you could definitely tell when he didn’t think he pushed hard enough, but it turns out that you don’t have to do much work when you’re already working with musical perfection.
Then again, The Edge would be the first one to say that most of U2’s records were far from perfect. They try to give it their best shot every time they make a record, but there are more than a few times where they try to do the best they can and cough it up. Some are more obvious than others, like Pop, and some are marred by stupid business decisions, like Songs of Innocence, but they all at least have that hunger to find that one song that no one else has found yet when they walk into the studio.
It’s not easy to capture that kind of magic, but most people are lucky to have been at the right place at the right time when working on one of those tracks. There’s no reason to think that someone would be able to walk out of the studio with a song like ‘One’ without putting in the work, and for all of the headaches that they weathered through trying to get Achtung Baby, sometimes you just need the right set of chords to put everything in the right place and have the track breathe in just the right way.
But once The Edge and Bono started to move outside conventional songwriting, it was bound to be a lot more daunting. No one would have imagined them writing a song for Tina Turner or helping put together tracks for Pavarotti, but even a song like ‘Miss Sarajevo’ seemed to come so naturally to them. And since they were becoming friendly with Frank Sinatra, why not try their hand at interpreting the Great American Songbook?
Admittedly, going into easy listening territory can also be a good opportunity to become boring within the span of a few minutes, but ‘Night and Day’ was something that they were all compelled to make. After all, most of Achtung Baby was about taking chances, and since Bono was already trying out different sides of his voice across the rest of the album, having The Edge work with this song was a true honour.
Cole Porter had laid out all the pieces for them to work with, but even then, The Edge claimed that there was no sense in trying to change what he had done, saying, “Cole Porter is one of those just giants of songwriting, and whether you’re a punk-rocker or a funker, or whatever you are, those tunes are undeniable. And so we got asked to do a cover for Red Hot + Blue, which is this AIDS charity that we really believed in. Youth was our producer on it.”
It does feel a little bit out of place when looking at the rest of Achtung Baby, and they were absolutely right to make the song its own separate entity, but it’s not actually that far off from what they were doing. If anything, this was a much better way for them to tap into new soundscapes than worrying about how to fit into the world of drum and bass music when they started making tracks like ‘Discotheque’.
That was a bit too far in the other direction, but had Bono and The Edge decided to make their own album with songs like this and ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, it wouldn’t have been that out of place. Bono’s voice could pretty much sing anything that he was given, so what was the problem with him ditching some of the desert-style wardrobe for a tux when working on this kind of music?
