The U2 song they wanted to give to Frank Sinatra: “Trying to summon up the spirit”
Artists usually have a lot of different sonic costumes in their closets. Even though it’s easy to go into that songwriting bank and try to pull out the same bag of tricks that you know work, there’s just as good of a chance to get away with something when you branch outside and try something new. While U2 could still be considered on the cutting edge of rock and roll in the mid-1990s, Bono envisioned the Zooropa of the band closer to something that you would hear from Frank Sinatra.
Then again, it’s hard to imagine ‘Ol Blue Eyes’ crooning over those same stuttering beats as the Achtung Baby era of U2. Never mind the fact that he was a traditionalist when it came to the classics, but Sinatra and Bono also seem to have totally different singing styles when you break them both down.
Sinatra liked his music to be old-fashioned and as far away from traditional rock and roll as possible, whereas Bono’s early days saw him adopting the same traditions as the punks. They could have come from opposite ends of the musical spectrum, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t find common ground.
Say what you want to about the way Bono presents himself, but he does know how to entertain a crowd compared to Sinatra’s robust delivery. So when it came time to write ‘Stay (Faraway, So Close!)’, the band actually were able to channel those retro sounds just a little bit.
When hashing the song out, The Edge remembered the group envisioning those older classics to guide them through the track, telling U2 by U2, “I was playing around on piano with some old-school chord progressions trying to summon up the spirit of Frank Sinatra. It’s definitely not from a rock and roll tradition”.
Although the track works for what it is, it’s one of the oddest songs they have ever put out, if only for the context in which you hear it. There may have been room for something like this in the band’s catalogue now, but hearing this tune when the last few tracks were centred around industrial glitchy noise like ‘Numb’ definitely puts the listener through their paces when listening.
But then again, that kind of huge genre separation might have been part of the magic. The entire appeal of their last tour, Zoo TV, was about the overabundance of content being shoved into the audience’s face, so hearing this right after something that could have come off of an electronic record actually adds to the ‘anything goes’ mentality as if the track is the result of someone changing the station throughout a long trip.
Bono did at least get to flex his classical chops a little bit more when he ended up duetting with Sinatra on ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. That might have been a result of him settling into the more elegant side of his ‘Fly’ persona, but for this song alone, it was just nice to see the band still wanting to take chances after conquering the world twice.
