‘With or Without You’: How U2 transformed a failed demo into a “weird ass sonic adventure”
Songwriters do everything they can to guide and shape their music, but sometimes the songs just don’t want to be written. In these situations, the best thing the songwriter can do is to stop resisting. As U2 discovered during the making of ‘With Or Without You’, some songs have a life of their own.
A powerful evocation of tortured love, ‘With Or Without You’ was U2’s breakthrough American hit. By 1987, the band had released four studio albums, the most recent of which The Unforgettable Fire (produced by Brian Eno) had made then a household name in the UK. With his eyes set firmly on American shores, Bono began writing some of the most personal material of his career. “I had some difficult emotional stuff going on,” he told Mojo. “I didn’t understand at that point the freedom that I would receive from a committed relationship. I was feeling guilty if I was talking to somebody in their record company who was really attractive. I was, you know, just everything was at eleven. But that’s why ‘With or Without You’ is so operatic and that’s OK.”
In the studio, ‘With Or Without You’ proved a hard nut to crack. The Joshua Tree session began in 1986, with U2 hauling up in a Georgian mansion outside Dublin to record the album. “Of course, it sounds like a pop song now,” Bono recalled during a conversation with Tom Powers. “It’s on jukeboxes, and I’m sure it sounds a bit mainstream to certain ears, but that is one weird ass sonic adventure of a song. It’s a very unusual construction.”
U2 had conceived of ‘With Or Without You’ as a sort of “psycho-pop” song, something at once explorative and accessible. Somehow, Bono explained, the band “missed the psycho bit and ended up with pop. And we’d thrown ‘With Or Without You’ into the trash.” The only person who thought the song deserved a second chance was Irish musician Gavin Friday, who encouraged U2 to rework the track, helping to “organise” and “arrange” it as a piece of expansive pop. “And he still hasn’t been paid,” Bono added.
Producer Brian Eno also played a crucial role, introducing The Edge to a prototype of the Infinite guitar, which he used to craft the song’s soaring lead guitar line. “We had a little secret weapon,” Eno told Songfacts, “invented by my good friend Michael Brook, a Canadian associate. Michael had invented this instrument where you didn’t have to use your right hand on the guitar. You just held a note with your left hand, and he had a little self-looping system built into the instrument. But as you went up higher on the guitar, the infinite sustain just kept going into the stratosphere.”
Previously, U2 had been unable to find an arrangement they liked. But with this new guitar line, everything seemed to fall into place. Following Gavin Friday’s advice to treat the track as a pop song, U2 bought in producer Steve Lillywhite, who remixed the track to boost its commercial appeal, putting him in direct conflict with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois: “‘With Or Without You’ was the one that there was the most discussion about, because Brian certainly had a very different idea of how it should go,” Lanois told Rolling Stone in 1987. “I had yet another idea, and Steve pushed the mix in a direction that was a little more mainstream in its approach. When the drums came in, they were a little more crash, bang, which is a sound that Steve is known for. Certainly, Brian would have preferred to have the drums be more mysterious and more supportive.”
Lillywhite not only cleaned-up and tightened what U2 had already recorded but also remixed certain aspects of the track to give the impression that it had been recorded in a live room. The result was a winning combination of meticulously crafted sonic bliss and anthemic dynamism. To this day, it remains one of U2’s most beloved tracks.
