The U2 song that drove The Edge insane: “Very frustrating”
It takes a small army for U2 to make an album that is decent by their standards.
They have always set the bar high, like so many of the legends that came before them, and even if they crawl their way up their own ass more than a few times, you have to admire the dedication they have to switching things up and taking chances every single time they make a record. But even when they were at the pinnacle of their career, The Edge remembered more than a few times where he felt like he was going crazy trying to get any number of their songs over the finish line.
When looking through a lot of their recording sessions, a lot of time is spent searching for the song that has the best feel on the record. No one else could have made the band surge and jump the way that Larry Mullen Jr could, but even if they had the best rhythmic foundation that they could ask for, it’s all about the layers that The Edge lies on top of everything before Bono comes in with his massive voice.
Everyone in the recording world could probably tell you where they were the first time they heard the effects on ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, and even when working on some of their classics in the 1990s, ‘One’ was proof that they could carry on making great rock and roll tunes without having to worry about cashing in on the trends that were coming out of the alternative world at the time.
The Edge was more than happy to keep switching up his style, but after Pop, it was clear that they were going too much in the wrong direction. No one wanted to hear U2 trying to be The Chemical Brothers or anything, and when All That You Can’t Leave Behind came out, it felt like a soft reboot for their entire brand. The classics had come back, but even if they got back on the right track, the problem was keeping it there.
And while How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was another step in the right direction, they didn’t want to keep making safe rock and roll, either. The Edge considered ‘Vertigo’ to be one of the only pure rock and roll songs they had ever made, but if they were going to touch people’s hearts again, he knew that they were going to need the right kind of heartache in their tunes when working on a song like ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’.
Despite following in the U2 tradition of ballads with obnoxiously long titles, the real challenge that The Edge had was trying to find the right approach whenever working on the guitar part, saying, “We really chased it around through different guises. The verses weren’t happening, so I reworked them. Then I reworked them again, and again. It was a very frustrating song, deceptively, maddeningly so. No matter what we tried, it kept sounding too traditional. And there’s a danger there because you don’t want to make some reverential pastiche, which is what we kept battling. Anyway, we ended up tabling it, but we brought it out of retirement while working on the new record.”
While the guitarist eventually credited Bono for saving the song by changing one of the chords, his job is what really ties the tune together. Bono might get credit for being one of the greatest frontmen of all time because of how he belts, but by keeping everything sparse in the mix, The Edge’s guitar is practically the heart of the song, always being that gentle bit of light to the tune when the chorus starts building.
It’s not exactly the most innovative U2 song of all time, and ‘Vertigo’ might still be one of the better tunes that they wrote in the 2000s, but the subtlety is what really makes the track. Not every song needs to have a massive presence behind it, and if they were to have added anything more to the final mix, it would have ruined the magic that they were already working with.
