“Most of the other ones make me cringe”: the one U2 song Bono still loves
There’s always been a love-hate relationship between Bono and the entire world of rock.
No one’s arguing the fact that U2 is one of the biggest bands in the world and deserves to be celebrated as such, but it does seem like Bono revels in being one of the most iconic frontmen a little too much, especially given how many long-winded speeches are featured in every U2 show. But given how self-righteous people claim that he is every time he goes onstage, Bono never claimed to be God’s gift to frontmen. If anything, he might actually agree with the criticism half the time.
It’s not like he doesn’t have any sense of self-awareness, and when U2 does screw up, they at least seem to learn from their mistakes. Bono has already had to hear about the headache of cramming Songs of Innocence on everyone’s phone for years now, and regardless of how many times that people got pissed off about it, the fact that he put his hand up and said that he made the wrong call is more than I can say for a lot of other musicians.
Even when Bono was immensely proud of the record that he was making, though, one of the biggest obstacles for him was his own voice. There are plenty of times where he felt like he wasn’t the right person to be singing their songs, and even though The Edge did a fantastic job singing a handful of their tunes, like the acoustic version of ‘Love is Blindness’, Bono isn’t the kind of person that you can replace, either.
He is the only singer that U2 could ever have, and that’s because he has the right amount of passion in his voice. There are many songs that could have done with being taken down a few keys, but when you hear him pushing himself to the top of his range on tunes like ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, he’s trying to reach that one level that makes everyone feel every word he’s singing.
It didn’t usually work for him on their rock-focused material, but getting the chance to sing with Pavarotti isn’t something that any singer walks away from. Bono had his work cut out for him, singing with one of the greatest tenors that the world had ever heard, but when writing the song ‘Miss Sarajevo’ for him, Bono could look back on that one song and actually feel like he was proud of what he had done.
Any other record would have been too painful to get through, but ‘Miss Sarajevo’ was the only example where Bono felt like he nailed it, saying, “I’ve been in the car when one of our songs has come on the radio and I’ve been the color of, as we say in Dublin, scarlet. I’m just so embarrassed. The one that I can listen to the most is ‘Miss Sarajevo’ with Luciano Pavarotti. Genuine, most of the other ones make me cringe a little bit.”
And with no disrespect to Bono, the fact that Pavarotti is doing much of the heavy lifting on the track certainly helps. The U2 frontman was never afraid to write songs that were outside of his comfort zone, but even if he managed to pull off the impossible by writing tunes for people like Tina Turner and singing duets with Frank Sinatra, the fact that he made songs that even the grandmothers of the world could appreciate was reaching another level of popularity.
Because even if Bono had more than a few songs that were a little bit cringy in the past, no one could take this moment away from him. He was more than a little bit annoying when he made speeches and there’s no shortage of people who liked to clown on him every now and again, but when he held his own next to one of the greatest singers of all time, no one could say that he didn’t know what he was doing.
