The Edge: U2’s Songs Surrendered

’Cause tonight, we can be as one. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was always U2’s epistle to Ireland. The band witnessed the often violent conflicts unfolding between Irish nationalists and unionists from the 1960s through the ’90s. The song, off U2’s 1983 album War, was also linked to the tragedy in Derry, Northern Ireland, (dubbed Bloody Sunday) nearly a decade earlier when British soldiers opened fire on a peaceful protest on January 30, 1972, killing 14 unarmed civilians.

And it’s true we are immune / When fact is fiction and TV reality / And today the millions cry / We eat and drink while tomorrow they die / The real battle just begun / To claim the victory Jesus won, rang the original closing verse of “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Opening War, at first, the weight of the track left the band hesitant to release it as a single.

“At the time we wrote that song, it was a very important song to us, but we were approaching some extremely sensitive subjects, and the one thing we were careful about is not endorsing paramilitary violence, because we were absolutely opposed to that,” says The Edge, who initially began writing it. “Our heroes were Martin Luther King and [Mahatma] Gandhi, but we were writing about a real incident that happened, the massacre of civilians in Derry in the early ’70s.”

In this careful space and within “safety of distance and time,” The Edge says, he and Bono approached what happened on Bloody Sunday more closely. The pair revisited the song with new lyrics on their new album Songs of Surrender, a collection of 40 songs crossing a majority of U2’s 14 albums—with the exception of the 1981 release October and No Line on the Horizon from 2009—stripped back and redefined.

Carefully treading back into “Sunday Bloody Sunday” more than 50 years since the tragic event, Bono and The Edge found due closure for the song: Here at the murder scene / The beginning of a fiction / The facts will not come clean / Why so many mothers cry? / Religion is the enemy of the Holy Spirit guide / The real battle yet begun / Where is the victory Jesus won?

“That’s a question,” said The Edge of the refreshed lyrics. “It’s a real question, particularly for Northern Irish context where so much of the animosity was based on traditions; the biggest most obvious difference was their denomination—Catholic or Protestant. It raises a lot of questions about the nature of faith and the nature of that message, the Christian message.

“There is talk of a victory to be had. The question is, in the context of Northern Ireland, when will that bear fruit? And there is peace now, which is wonderful, but there isn’t yet a complete integration of the two communities there. There’s still quite a lot of mistrust, so we live in hope.”

Songs of Surrender was an opportunity to bring songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—while originally powered by Larry Mullen Jr.’s marching drum beats, the new version makes the lyrics more resonant—full circle and meet the band where they are now. 

“The fact is that much of our work was written and recorded when U2 were a bunch of very young men,” The Edge writes in the liner notes. “Those songs mean something quite different to us now. Some have grown with us, some we have outgrown, but we have not lost sight of what it was that propelled us to write those songs in the first place.”

Marked by their numeric bookends, Songs of Surrender opens on the 1997 Achtung Baby hit “One,” and closes 39 tracks later on “40,” written four decades ago for War.

Songs of Surrender breaks down U2’s catalog of songs to their barest state with no more than an acoustic guitar and piano and some electric guitar. The project features refreshed renditions of the band’s two Billboard No. 1s “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and even further back to their 1980 debut, Boy, with“I Will Follow,” “Stories for Boys,” and “Out of Control”—the latter two first appearing on the band’s 1979 EP Three. 

Taking an acoustic cover on Songs of Surrender, the even more distant “Out of Control” was also the first song Bono ever wrote for the band on May 10, 1978, his 18th birthday, a few years after U2 formed in 1976 in Dublin at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, where they all attended school as teens.

Reimagining the songs on Songs of Surrender—following U2’s 14th studio album Songs of Experience in 2017, the companion release to Songs of Innocence in 2014—was less challenging for The Edge since a majority of them have been with the band for so long. In the end, he says, it was more about acquiescing to the lyrics.

“Songs have always been our boss,” he says. “That’s the way we look at it. Whether we’re putting together a live show or an album, or trying to finish a song, you’re trying to retain the essence of the idea and keep your fingerprints off it as much as possible. Songs are alive. They occupy a position because they’re really expressing our sentiments and feelings and ideas, and those change and develop.”

Retaining the essence of the original form, integrity, and sentiment of each track, while sieving in slightly new stories in lyrics, pulled The Edge out of his comfort zone. 

“Getting out of your comfort zone makes you creative, and it makes for good ideas, whether it’s a film, or a song, or whatever,” reveals The Edge, who produced the album along with Bob Ezrin. The Edge previously co-produced U2’s 1993 album Zooropa with Brian Eno and Flood.

Changing lyrics just for the sake of it was never predetermined, and is evident on the band’s one-off 1980 single “11 O’Clock Tick Tock,” which was later released on the 1983 live album, Under a Blood Red Sky. Another blast from the past, its newer version is driven by more jazz guitar and retains most of the original lyrics, while “Stories for Boys”—written when the band was still boys—had more lyrical nuances.

“Some of those lyrics started to feel a little strange coming out of our mouths now that we’re in our 60s,” shares The Edge. “The best way to honor the songs would be to make them relevant, so that when we’re performing them, it still resonates with that same integrity and essence that it had originally, but now in this new era of the band’s life.”

At first, The Edge says that they didn’t know how the songs would turn out, and any lyrical refreshes were never preconceived. “As we were starting to sing,” says The Edge, “these new lyric ideas presented themselves.”

The Edge went into each song on acoustic guitar and piano, fleshing out basic arrangements recorded on his laptop, which became more defined while recording with Bono singing over the raw tracks. “The bare minimum was the rule,” says The Edge. “I was thinking about it like a musical version of Jenga. You’re taking out all the support and leaving just what will do the job, so the process is very organic. We took each song and just let it tell us what needed to be done.

“The rawness of it and the simplicity of it is the charm. An overarching idea was that we wanted to use a sort of radical intimacy. We wanted it to be in such contrast to the early versions, which are full band arrangements designed to be taken out on a stage and performed live, so they had to have a certain intensity, a certain conviction. In going more intimate, in most cases, much more intimate, the lyric and the melodic content changed slightly. It became more dimensional, at least.”

Songs like “With or Without You” and “Beautiful Day” were the more difficult tracks to rework since there’s very little change in the chord progression throughout the song. “When you’re working with a rock ’n’ roll band, the dynamics that you have at your disposal are a huge tool to keeping intrigue and the arrangement from sounding too static,” says The Edge. “But of course, when you take away the rock ’n’ roll band, or if you’re trying to play it on acoustic guitar, it becomes quite challenging.”

U2’s 1984 The Unforgettable Fire song “Pride (In the Name of Love),” was another test in production. Stripped down, it had a tendency to become too sentimental.

“That’s the thing that we were trying to battle against,” says The Edge. “When you take away the hard edges of a rock ’n’ roll band, it can inevitably make things sound softer and more emotionally drenched, so we were constantly trying to find ways to add tension and offset the emotional saturation in some of these melodies and lyrics. ‘Pride’ took a while. There were a couple of piano versions that were just way too … sweet.” 

Songs of Surrender wasn’t meant to be a “nice album,” The Edge says. “I think people get sick of it, if it’s too insipid,” he says. “Whereas, I think if you introduce tension or some kind of dissonance and the need to resolve things, then it keeps the ear intrigued.”

The makings of a song, the music, and the lyrics, are in constant flux for The Edge. Sometimes, it starts off with a drum beat, at the piano, or through chord progressions and builds from there. Early on, U2 would find the beginning of a song by jamming together. There was also more improvising with lyrics often arriving long after the music. 

“Even on our first album [Boy], we’d been performing some of those songs live for months, and there were still no finished lyrics,” The Edge reveals. 

Nowadays, The Edge tends to generate the beginnings and brings them to the band, sometimes near completion or in other cases, very rough as a starting point. “I’m more about the emotional weight that is contained within the chord progressions and chord shifts,” he says, “and the sonic terrain.”

Engaging with an emotional feeling, he says, is the communicator within a song, not the sonic power. “It’s amazing how stripping it down will really tell you what you’ve got because you can sometimes be fooled by the sonic power,” says The Edge. “Off the back of this experience, I will be doing more of that, because you start to really appreciate the essence of what you’ve got when you strip everything away.”

The fact that they were able to rewrite these 40 tracks, The Edge says, is a sign that the songs are still living. 

“It shows you that songs, they are alive, and they can be updated,” he says. “Great poets do it all the time. [William Butler] Yeats, throughout his life, would revise and change stanzas in his poems, and people like Harold Pinter, if you go through a Pinter production now, you’ll find scenes have been updated and changed. So it’s not unique to us, but I think giving ourselves the permission to do that was an important part of a kind of freedom we felt we had, and enjoyed, in making this work.”

Though Songs of Surrender took U2 back in time, it left them squarely in their present.

“I’m much more aware and understand a lot more about what goes into a great song configuration,” says The Edge. “I don’t want to ever get to the point where it becomes too methodical in the sense of predictable.”

These days, he says he’s more interested in approaching music and songwriting with some naivety and a “sense of experimentation and discovery” over a specific format. 

“That’s probably the greatest gift that we possess within the band,” The Edge says. “It’s not necessarily knowing how to get there, but recognizing when we have hit on something.”