After 50 years as one of the biggest bands in the world, there’s something charming in the way that U2 keeps acting like they have something to prove. We all watched how actors, artists, and musicians handled the pandemic and its lockdown, whether it was Toyah Willcox and husband Robert Fripp staging elaborate dance numbers in their kitchen or St. Vincent drinking martinis and calling random fans live on Instagram. If you’re the Edge, apparently what you do is look at your band’s entire body of work and decide that it’s time to re-record it.
The result is Songs of Surrender, released on St. Patrick’s Day, in 16-track standard and 40-track deluxe versions with at least half a dozen different colored vinyl versions. Although this release is being marketed as a U2 record, it’s truly an Edge solo project that he invited Bono to sing on. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton are on the cover and credited on each track, but it’s been made clear that Adam just recorded a bunch of basslines and left it to Edge to sort through and take what he wanted, while Larry’s participation mostly came via old tape scraps from previous sessions.
In the liner notes and in the press, Edge makes the point, repeatedly, that they recorded a lot of these songs when they were “very young men” and that Bono’s voice is much richer now, so why not re-evaluate them as men in their 60s, with a more refined vocal instrument? There’s also a general narrative voiced by multiple band members that the songs “weren’t finished” and here, now, he finally had the chance to finish them. (That these songs were somehow unfinished will be news to the millions of fans who have sung along to them at the top of their lungs, gotten them tattooed on their arms, or otherwise made them part of their lives for decades.)
Yes, it is true that 1980’s “Stories for Boys” was written when U2 themselves were boys. But that is a valuable perspective: The original is scattershot and impressionistic, more about feeling than precision. The Songs of Surrender version is stripped down to piano with the Edge on vocals, and the lyrics have perhaps more specificity than the original. That subversion, however, does not improve the song at all. In contrast, Pete Townshend wrote “My Generation” when he was 20, and the Who are still out there singing “Hope I die before I get old.”