The U2 song that Bono initially wrote for Nina Simone: “To me, it’s like a prayer”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, U2 realised that commercial success didn’t always mean creative satisfaction.
Fatigue and tensions became a mainstay of U2’s years post The Joshua Tree, and feeling out of sorts when it came to creative expression started to weigh them down. As Larry Mullen Jr put it, they were at one point the biggest band there was, but they were in no way, shape, or form the best, and it sparked a frustration like no other.
Throughout the Lovetown Tour at the tail-end of the decade, the band went through a major re-evaluation when it came to the kind of legacy they wanted, and it started with realising that the one they already had wasn’t it, with Bono revealing to their audience at their last show, they needed to go away and think about their own identity.
However, after that realisation came the struggle of not knowing where to start; establishing a new creative direction was the primary challenge at first, which Bono addressed by looking outward at his own influences, letting different sounds guide the kind of music he wanted to be a part of. He also naturally became closer to The Edge through this reshuffle, and the pair became primary songwriters away from the rest of the group, forming a microcosm of the two.
With a handful of demos and a gravitation towards experimentation, Achtung Baby was finally in motion, but what they probably hadn’t prepared for was the personal challenges they’d face during the creation of the record. At first, disagreements about which direction they should go in cause much exasperation, added to the fact that they chose isolation from their families to focus on the project, and hence, morale started to plummet.
Worried they hadn’t made any progress and couldn’t figure out what they were doing, the much-needed turning point occurred when they wrote ‘One’, which provided the necessary reassurance that they were on the right track. But The Edge was also battling his own problems, having just separated from his wife, and his moment of emotional and musical release came with ‘Love Is Blindness’, a song that Bono originally wrote for Nina Simone.
It took a while to get there, though, as alongside their voluntary isolation during recording was the attitude that distraction was good for creativity. If a musician were working alone, the others would use distraction as a tool to push them away from a ‘predictable path’. The Edge hated this and took matters into his own hands by telling them to leave him alone, and the solo that followed ended up being the one they used on ‘Love Is Blindness’.
As Bono recalled to the LA Times: “It was written for Nina Simone, and we just started playing it one night, and the band liked it, so we decided to put it on the album. But the best thing about the record is Edge’s guitar playing. To me, it’s like a prayer.”
Achtung Baby is lauded as a masterpiece, which, all things considered, is hard to argue against, but it was also a complete and utter mess from start to finish, A mixture of clashing visions and over-ambiguous themes and images getting in the way of U2 becoming the version they felt they deserved to be. However, through the chaos came accidental excellence, the rawness of many of the songs carrying the emotional core that has cemented it as a timeless piece of material in their catalogue.
