Adam Clayton recently joined Billboard to discuss U2’s new record, ‘Songs of Surrender,’ as he disclosed how Johnny Cash uniquely influenced the album.
Adam was quite excited to talk about the record, which features forty songs along with new musical perspectives. He discussed how U2’s musical take evolved over the years, so when he and the Edge were going through frontman Bono’s book, ‘Surrender: 40 songs, One Story,’ they had the fantastic idea to remaster the tracks they had written and composed in their early years.
The band had new perspectives and ways of story-telling as 60-year-olds, so they came up with different takes with each song, telling their story through a Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson-type gravitas. So, it was definitely something special and unique, and the idea had come to them spontaneously.
The bassist on coming up with the record and Johnny Cash-inspired takes:
“was one of the more organic processes that U2 engaged in. We started to talk about what we could be doing while (Bono) was busy making this book. Edge said, ‘Let me have a look at those titles. 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].
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. From the position of being in our sixties, those lyrics and those songs meant something, and it meant Edge could slow them down. He could bring the key down. Bono could deliver the vocals in a different way.
And suddenly, there was a personality that had much more of the gravitas of a story that Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson might tell. It engaged with you in a different way. It stopped you thinking about that big ol’ 80s rock band that had this big, stadium-filling sound.”
One can easily see how the band kept their musical bond intact after all these years, still working very well together towards a common dream. This harmony is surely what makes their sound so prominent and shows that acts might go long runs without feuds and disbanding.
