It’s open to whatever interpretation the listener might want to make. I’m not gonna say it’s random, but it’s not premeditated as such. “It was after everything was recorded,” he says, “so it wasn’t that I curated the tracks that were gonna be on my (side of) the record. While each grouping of 10 songs is consigned to one member of the band, that’s more of a packaging element than anything symbolic, he says. The bassist has some favorites amongst the 40, including “Stories For Boys,” which Clayton calls “a beautiful insight into Edge as an artist and a singer,” and “All I Want Is You,” which allowed him to do some acoustic bass playing where “I can really hear the air moving and I can hear my fingers on the strings, and I just like that intimacy.”

It stopped you thinking about that big ol’ 80s rock band that had this big, stadium-filling sound.”

And suddenly there was a personality that had much more of the gravitas of a story that Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson might tell. Bono could deliver the vocals in a different way. “From the position of being in our sixties, those lyrics and those songs meant something, and it meant Edge could slow them down. “We started to see that a lot of the early songs that had felt incomplete or unfinished or naive, when one looked at them now, those were songs with a lot of DNA and intuition on them,” Clayton explains. Let me see if I can come up with a different space for those songs so we can present them in a way where the narrative of the song in some way is associated to the arc of the book.'” The Edge began creating drastically different arrangements, mostly stripped down and more intimate, sometimes changing lyrics and even vocalists The Edge, in fact, stepped up to sing several of the tracks himself. Edge said, ‘Let me have a look at those titles. We started to talk about what we could be doing while (Bono) was busy making this book.

The album, according to Clayton, “was one of the more organic processes that U2 engaged in.

That album, according to Clayton, was spurred directly by Bono’s best-selling Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, in which the singer used 40 U2 songs as a narrative vehicle for his story. Songs of Surrender is certainly a project that came as a surprise.

U2 by u2