If you were one of the relatively lucky few to get tickets to the gig, then you already know that U2 are gearing up for a 30th anniversary tour of their seminal album Joshua Tree.
While the aftermath of the ticket sell-outs and pricing hike still smarts, fans of the group will be happy to know that they’re busy in the studio reworking some of the tracks from that classic LP, as well as working on the new project.
In a new interview with MOJO, Bono went back to the master and re-recorded his vocal for a new version of Red Hill Mining Town, and he says that the band also “brought out the colliery brass band which was recorded at the time…You can’t hear it in the original mix.”
Meanwhile, looking forward to their fourteenth studio album Songs Of Experience, the follow-up to that 2014 automatic iTunes addition album Songs Of Innocence, and they say its around 85% finished, but they’ve gone back to tweak some of it because, you guessed it, Donald Trump happened.
According to the fansite @U2, they have have been re-rehearsing the tracks for the new album, with the plan to recording some of them again live at Electric Lady Studios in New York in March with Steve Lillywhite, the producer that the band worked with on the likes of Boy, October, War and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.
The Edge told Rolling Stone the reasons behind the album delay: “Well, when we came off the last tour, the Innocence And Experience indoor tour, we headed straight into finishing the second album of that set, Songs Of Experience, which we were pretty much complete with after a couple of weeks of the final touches leading up to the end of the year. And then the election [happened] and suddenly the world changed. We just went, “Hold on a second — we’ve got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what’s going on in the world.” That’s because it was written mostly, I mean, 80 percent of it was started before 2016, but most of it was written in the early part of 2016, and now, as I think you’d agree, the world is a different place.”
Meanwhile, bassist Adam Clayon told MOJO that they wanted to focus more on refining their sound on the new project: “There wasn’t clarity to some of the mixes [on Songs Of Innocence] and we needed to be a little bit more inventive sonically. I mean, that record, when we performed it live, the songs became very, very masculine and very tough and we didn’t really capture that on the record. So again one of the reasons why we’re trying to slow this down a bit is we really want to get the mixes right. We don’t want a soup. We want a consommé.”
Hey, if it means we’re getting a great U2 album, then we’re willing to wait. But maybe let us buy this time, instead of forcing it upon us like an update nobody asked for.
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