The U2 song Bono thought was never complete: “It’s just a sketch”
No artist can ever really be satisfied when they walk out of the studio. You can still be proud of the music made within those four walls, but more often than not, you will be kicking yourself, saying that you could have done something better if you had another pass. Although Bono seems like the kind of guy who is proud of nearly everything having to do with U2, there were pieces of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ that never sat well with him.
Then again, every U2 song is in a perpetual state of change. Even when talking about working with the band throughout their classic output, Daniel Lanois said that most U2 albums are never truly finished but are just put out because they have to meet the label’s deadline.
Even if the song works great in the studio, that’s only a fraction of what the band could do to it live. Sure, a piece like ‘Bad’ sounds great when you hear it on The Unforgettable Fire, but when fans saw Bono turning in one of his finest performances at Live Aid, the track seemed to take on an entirely new meaning.
Since they were now one of the biggest bands in the world, ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ was the band’s way of opening up The Joshua Tree with a bang. This was going to be the album that could stand as their magnum opus, so there was no room for just making a decent song to kick everything off.
From the opening notes of The Edge’s guitar, the band already sound like they want to unleash hell right out of the gate. Once Bono opens his mouth to sing, this doesn’t feel like a song anymore; it feels like a call to action. The minute that he talks about tearing down the walls of preservation and moving into a world of adventure, you want to go along with him every step of the way.
Even though the song is still one of the greatest U2 anthems and a live staple everywhere they go, Bono did have a few issues with the lyrics of the track, saying, “Musically it’s great, and the band deserve credit for that, but lyrically it’s just a sketch, and I was going to go back and write it out… ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ is not a great lyric. I just wouldn’t have rhymed ‘hide’ with ‘inside’. I knew I could write that better.”
Then again, Bono might be falling into the trap of getting bogged down by the mechanics of songwriting. Many artists are so focused on the phonetic side of writing or the clever turns of phrase that it stops sounding good, but by giving the song a bit more room to breathe, those kinds of simplistic lyrics actually work really well, almost serving as a rock and roll hymn anyone can sing along to.
If anything, Bono should be a little harder on himself when going through some of his back pages. Any artist can have a handful of pieces that they wished would have gone off a little better, but how did we manage to exist in a timeline where Bono would defend a song like ‘Get On Your Boots’ yet be cutthroat to ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’?
