Yesterday I asked my three year old son what he wanted to listen to while we were driving, Coldplay or U2? He replied, “Wallflowers!”

May 13-15 2009, an academic conference on U2 will be held in New York: U2: The Hype and the Feedback

Scholars, teachers, students, journalists, clergy, musicians and intellectually curious U2 fans: for more than 30 years, U2 has asked us to look at the world, wrestle with ourselves and then dream out loud. From “I Will Follow” and “Running to Stand Still,” to “The Wanderer,” “Walk On,” and “One Step Closer,” U2 has charted the human heart and the ways of the world, calling out some of their more dynamic points of intersection. While doing so, they have created what Bruce Springsteen described as “some of the most beautiful sonic architecture in rock and roll.”

This is a pretty funny petition requesting that Bono retire from his public quest to rid the world of extreme poverty, etc. The petitioners pledge to give money to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, malaria, and TB. Their aim:

“To get Bono to retire from public life (so he’ll stop leading misguided counter-productive philanthropy efforts).”

In case you haven’t heard, U2 is re-releasing their first three albums (Boy, October, War) next month. In addition to remastering the sound, new B-sides, vinyl versions, and double disk sets will be available. Read the tracklists here. Sounds like they will do some creative releasing with the new album, perhaps along the lines of Radiohead and NIN’s new albums, creative commons maybe?

*Update on album title, tracks, audio, and release here.

No name, no firm info, but a partial track list….

• No Line On The Horizon” – Bono and Edge played this song for a USA Today writer during an in-the-car interview at the Sundance Film Festival. On hearing it, writer Anthony Breznican says “heavy distortion fills the car,” and later adds: “The song is rough, weaving between brutal guitar blasts underscoring the mellow title refrain.” Edge explains that the song “It came out of a new distortion box that my guitar tech got.”
• Unknown Title – in the same interview with Anthony Breznican, Bono and Edge played a second song whose opening lyric is, “It’s six o’clock…”. Bono tells Breznican that numbers are significant in each of the new songs.
• “If I Could Live My Life Again” – Bono says this song is “inspired by the great Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges.” Bono said he had just begun the song while speaking with author Michka Assayas in December, 2005. Their interview appears as the extra material in the paperback version of Bono in Conversation with Michka Assayas.
• “Love Is All We Have Left” – a song Bono named during his May, 2006, trip to Africa as one that he had recently written. “It’s like an old Broadway tune. I thought it was a Frank Sinatra song,” Bono said.
• “North Star,” a song from the How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb sessions which included a guest organ appearance from Michael W. Smith. In this CCM article, Smith describes the song as a tribute to Johnny Cash.
• “Mercy“, one of the last songs to get cut from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, described in Blender magazine as “a six-and-a-half-minute outpouring of U2 at its most uninhibitedly U2-ish”
• “Lead Me In The Way I Should Go” — a contender for Atomic Bomb first mentioned in this February, 2003, interview with Bono in Grammy Magazine
• “You Can’t Give Away Your Heart” – a contender for Atomic Bomb first mentioned in SPIN magazine

HT: @U2 : CM

I posted this last year and found it just as reflective and awe-inspiring as last year…

This reflection on Christmas occurred after Bono had just returned home, to Dublin, from a long tour with U2. On Christmas Eve Bono went to the famous St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Jonathan Swift was dean. Apparently he was given a really poor seat, one obstructed by a pillar, making it even more difficult for him to keep his eyes open…but it was there that Christmas story struck him like never before. He writes:

“The idea that God, if there is a force of Logic and Love in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw…a child… I just thought: “Wow!” Just the poetry … Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it’s not that it hadn’t struck me before, but tears came streaming down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this.”

Isn’t it compelling? The logic and love of a personal God revealing himself, accounting for our person-ality, our propensity to love. And oh, the mercy of God, born in shit and straw, to rescue us from ourselves, our godless gift-giving, and our arrogant disregard for God and for others so that we might know and enjoy him and his new creation forever. And that he, the infinite God, would do it in Christ, in time, in space, in confounding condescension to pivot the course of the entire creation project from despair, destruction, and dereliction to a hopeful, whole, and happy future.

Will you ponder the poetry of Christmas this year, the genius of the incarnation? What obstructions are in your path to dwelling on the vulnerable, inexhaustible power and love of God in Christ? Renounce them and rivet your attention on the Christ.

Excerpt taken from Bono: in conversation (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 124-5.

In an unannounced four song acoustic set to support Mencap, a charity for those with learning disabilities, Bono and the Edge demonstrated once again what sets U2 apart from so many bands. The duo played four songs “Stay,” “Desire,” “Angel of Harlem” and “Wave of Sorrow,” the last song inspired by Bono’s 1985 trip to Ethiopia, recently released with the remastered version of Joshua Tree. See article here.