Albums
Songs of Surrender
“People say your songs are like your children,” Bono tells Apple Music. “Wrong: Your songs are like your parents. They tell you what to do, how to dress. But after a while, if you're successful, songs become big. They're owned by other people, not you. And with this collection, we were sort of trying to listen to them again and trying to think, well, first of all, will they hold up? Will they stand up to being broken down outside of the firepower of a rock ’n’ roll band like U2?” In their 45 years as a band, U2 has done little in the way of looking backwards. Bono’s 2022 memoir Surrender changed that—a story of his life and career told through the prism of 40 songs. Thanks to a global pandemic shelving whatever grander plans the band had, this compilation is an extrapolation of that, with 40 songs from across their vast catalog—10 selected by each band member—completely reworked, largely acoustically. “Suddenly we had the space and time to just make music without there being any kind of pressure or any expectation,” says The Edge. “This idea I'd been knocking around for a while was to try some more of our songs in a stripped-down way that we had done over the years. But also the joy of it was there was no necessity to put it out if we didn't like it.” For Bono, revisiting the past in such depth would not have been an option had the band not been doing so much work on new music; the project was as much a taking stock of where they’ve been as a map of where they can still go in their fifth decade. “Songs of Surrender is only possible because of so much amazing momentum for the future,” he says. “And to be fair, we have a drummer who is injured and can't be playing rock ’n’ roll. And so if we take this interest in acoustic music and intimacy being the new punk rock—which it is—I really believe in the force of intimacy and these earbuds and the way we listen to music now.” This intimate end result is not just a chance to revamp (or, in some cases, m...