Top 25 U2 Songs: Dreaming It All Up Again
Another group of songs from the Irish group, including four from their 1991 masterpiece Achtung Baby.
We’re getting back into my countdown of my Top 25 U2 songs. In the last installment, we largely focused on tracks off of The Joshua Tree. We’ll begin with at that album with this next batch of songs, starting off with…
“One Tree Hill”
One last song from that classic album, which was written as a tribute to the band’s friend and roadie Greg Carroll, who was killed in a motorcycle accident. Carroll, a New Zealander, took Bono to One Tree Hill in New Zealand, which the lead singer drew upon in his lyrics.
This features some of my favorite lyrics Bono has ever written. This couplet, which comes at the very end of the song, is especially poignant.
I'll see you again when the stars fall from the sky
And the moon has turned red over One Tree Hill
The lyrics echo the Book of Revelation, while also in some strange way making me think of these lines from Romeo and Juliet:
When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night.
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Musically, the song is very much a slow burn, subdued when compared to the grandiosity of the other great tracks on the album. Yet, it’s not lacking in power and emotional resonance because it burns a bit lower. It has an earthy, almost world music feel to it with Larry Mullen’s drums on this track are particularly memorable.
“Even Better Than The Real Thing”
Now we’re moving into a quartet of songs from Achtung Baby, the band’s landmark 1991 album that represented a major shift in their sound. Famously, at the 1989 New Year’s Eve show in Dublin, the band said they were going to “dream it all up again” for the next decade. This sent them to Berlin, to move away from anything like what they’d done up until that point.
The resulting sound that dominates Achtung Baby, which you hear quite clearly on “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” is much more electronic. There’s a sheen to the song, particularly on The Edge’s guitar, which feels much more futuristic when compared to the more rootsy work on Joshua Tree.
Even the music video for the song, when compared with their videos from the 1980s, feels radically different.
I also had to include this song because it features my senior-year high-school yearbook quote
We're free to fly the crimson sky
The sun won't melt our wings tonight
For the burgeoning English teacher-type snob, it’s hard to beat an Icarus allusion.
“Ultra Violet (Light My Way)”
This song’s place in the encore of the U2 360 tour shows cemented its place in my personal rankings. Here it is captured in the band’s performance at the Rose Bowl.
It was a song that I didn’t spend that much time with in my initial spins of Achtung Baby, but after seeing it performed during those shows it became one of my favorites.
The U2 360 performances opened my eyes to the song, and I went back and dug into the Zoo TV renditions and those were pretty amazing. Here’s one from Dublin in 1993 (audio only).
In these ZooTV performances of the song, there’s a way in which the song breaks down and deteriorates at it goes along, especially in Bono’s singing. The song turns into a kind of Dark Night of the Soul (which leads perfectly into “With or Without You,” which is what would follow it in the setlist).
The Edge’s work on this song jumps out to me—the different guitar sounds and elements he has on display. You get the straight-forward lead guitar work, then you get elements where the guitar almost feels like a rhythm instrument. There’s also a moment on the album version of the song, just before the final verse, where Adam Clayton’s bass slinks in and briefly takes center stage.
Lyrically, it’s a pretty representative U2 track in that it can be read/heard as an either a love song or as a work of spiritual exploration. It’s certainly in keeping with the interpretation of the song as being about two who were in love, but that third verse features another standout set of lyrics.
I remember
When we could sleep on stones
Now we lie together
In whispers and moans
As I indicated from the beginning, I’m not building to an ultimate Top 5 here, but “Ultraviolet” is one that would almost certainly be in that list if I were to make it. It’s one of the great U2 songs, one that illustrates what makes them an important band, and should be on everyone’s radar.
“Until the End of the World”
As I’ve mentioned before, U2’s religious/spiritual charge was a key part of their appeal to me. On this Achtung Baby track, they make it explicit (in a fascinating way) by writing a song from the perspective of Judas as he is going to betray Jesus, thus precipitating the crucifixion and resurrection.
Those lyrics, which touch on temptation and spiritual conflict, fit well alongside U2’s other songs (and, apparently, were influenced by the poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Byron) while the Edge’s guitar heroics and pyrotechnics are on full display. When it’s performed in concert, like at the 2001 Slane Castle show, the Edge really gets to shine and take center stage.
“One”
More so than any song in just about any of these series/countdowns I’ve done or will do, “One” is the song I feel like I don’t know how to talk about and yet feel like there’s so much to say.
It’s the first U2 song I became obsessed with. While All That You Can’t Leave Behind was what brought the band to my attention, I have a very distinct memory of getting a used copy of Achtung Baby from the local extremely punk rock record store in my hometown (and, as a sidebar, what must the cashier been thinking when this kid’s coming into the record store to by a U2 CD…) and I listened to “One” over and over. I’d lay in my bed at night, Discman playing and headphones on, pressing back every time the song ended.
I always love when the story of making the song becomes a part of the song itself. I think about how Springsteen’s desperation, feeling like it was his last shot, pushed him to make “Born to Run” what it became. With “One,” I think about the story of how the band travelled to Hansa Studios in Berlin to record for the album. But things were not going well and the band was on the brink of breaking up. But the combination of a chord progression The Edge had coupled with Bono’s lyrics brought the band back together and has kept them going… well, into the present.
In the same way as “Ultraviolet,” and just as so many of the best U2 songs, it can be heard as being a profoundly personal song (about, say, the breakup of a relationship between two people) or it can be applied outward to something that goes beyond the interpersonal. Musically, it’s masterful in the way it builds and builds, the tension and emotion growing until you get to “Love is a temple/love the higher law/you ask me to enter/but then you make me crawl/and I can't be holding on to what you got/when all you got is hurt” and this tremendous release/outpouring of emotion. There have been a ton of great and important performances of “One,” but one I find myself returning to is the version captured during the PopMart tour dedicated to INXS singer Michael Hutchence who has died just a few days before this concert.
Something I’ve found myself always thinking about with the lyrics is the line “We’re one, but we’re not the same.” Bono has said how the song is a pushback against those notions of “we’re all the same, let’s live together.” The notion that we’re not all the same, that there are things that make us different and individuals, but we’re also connected in some essential way and thus we get to (not have to) carry each other and help each other… that’s very powerful. I’ve brought up this idea, “we’re one, but we’re not the same,” with my students to emphasize that we all are not and do not have to be alike but we all share one essential things that ties us together and binds us, and thus we care for and take care of each other.
I feel like there’s so much that I’m not saying about this song, which is one of the great ones in the history of rock/popular music, but I also feel like I’m about to lapse into repeating myself and not really saying anything substantial so I’ll stop there.