“The best it’s ever been”: The U2 album Bono said displayed his best vocals
Any singer will want to look over their instrument like it’s some sort of prized possession. It’s not easy trying to work on different scales when the instrument is an extension of your body, so that means that every time someone decides to drink too much after a show, their voice will let them know what happened later on. Although Bono can usually be critical of his own voice in some areas, he confessed that the best version of his voice that he had ever put on record didn’t come until decades into their career in the 2000s.
Throughout the 1980s, though, Bono seemed to be in his absolute prime no matter what he decided to sing. As much as people claimed to be turned off by his politics, no one could deny that he didn’t believe in what he was singing, especially when he was going for the higher notes on ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ or channelling something gritty on ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’.
Around the time that grunge was starting to trickle in, though, Bono was already rearranging his usual approach to vocals. He could still sing to the best of his ability, but throughout every track on Achtung Baby, he started to realise the power that he had from channelling his falsetto every now and then.
In fact, are we sure that his ‘Fly’ persona wasn’t his excuse to try out different places within his voice? Because even though he seemed to be playing up the pompous rock star angle that millions had done before him, it’s hard to listen to a song like ‘Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me’ and not believe that he was inhabiting some different part of his voice to see what he could get away with.
Although How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is a bit of a restart for the group in some respects, Bono rang through loud and clear at the beginning of ‘Vertigo’. Never mind the fact that he butchered another language in counting off the intro; this was the same person responsible for The Joshua Tree, only with his voice right in the centre of the mix without any trickery behind it.
The tunes are far from the greatest that the Irish legends ever recorded, but it didn’t matter as long as Bono believed what he was singing, saying, “My voice is the best it’s ever been on this record. And I believe that it’s my father’s gift to me. He was a great tenor, and when he died, he passed that on to me.”
Still, it’s hard to argue with the commitment that Bono put into every one of the tunes. ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’ might not have the same emotional gut punch as ‘One’ did years before, but the minute that those falsetto backing vocals come in on the chorus, he sounds like he’s giving you a warm hug from the other side of the speakers.
Because even if he didn’t have the best technique or the greatest range of his peers, Bono was never about being technically proficient. That was reserved for the classical musicians of the world, and all he was looking for was to make a tune that sounded like someone laying down their soul onto the tape.
