The U2 classic they hated at first: “We tried too hard”
It’s not that hard for U2 to talk about how important their music is. As much as Bono has admitted there being flaws in many of their tracks, not many artists have compared the importance of their songs to a higher power and looked more like self-absorbed rock stars than he has over the years. When they were undergoing their transformation into post-ironic rock gods, the band were initially annoyed hearing the song ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’.
Then again, anything that sounded remotely like U2 would probably be thrown out when working on Achtung Baby. The band still had the potential to make great songs, but that was often swallowed up by industrial-sized productions whenever they put out tracks like ‘Zoo Station’ and ‘Until the End of the World’.
That didn’t mean they couldn’t recognise a great song when they saw one. The ballad ‘One’ has become one of their most celebrated anthems for a reason, but ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’ falls a little bit in between both parties. It features some of the noisiest guitars that The Edge had put to tape on the intro of the song, but the rest of the track feels like the kind of song that never made it onto The Joshua Tree.
In fact, maybe a little bit too much that like that album. When working on the initial backing track, producer Steve Lillywhite remembered how frustrated the band were when hearing the final version, telling Q, “They hated that song. I spent a month on it, and I still don’t think it was as realised as it could’ve been. The Americans had heard it and said, ‘That’s your radio song there’ because they were having trouble with some of the more industrial elements [of the album]. It’s almost like a covers band doing a U2 moment. Maybe we tried too hard”.
At the same time, sometimes a band making this drastic a change needs that kind of shift to let fans know they are still human. Regardless of how many U2-isms are present on the final mix, it still holds together as a great song, as Bono muses on whether he’s going to be emotionally stable after this woman leaves him on his ass.
If anything, this works great in the context of its place on the album. The entire record up until this point has only been about the sour side of love, but hearing Bono sound so open-hearted on this song actually makes him sound more vulnerable than any other moment on the album. This is the same man who would be christening himself as the larger-than-life persona of ‘The Fly’, so hearing him actually cry out in pain and not know all the answers to life’s problems is oddly comforting.
It was also probably more true to life than most of the public wanted to admit, too. Even after conquering the world and now knee-deep in their creative reinvention, even someone with an ego the size of Bono’s could admit he was scared about what was coming next. It’s hard for any artist to get the sympathy of their fans once they reach the top of the rollercoaster, but no one can touch a band when they decide to become human right in front of your eyes.
