U2 “Songs of Innocence”
2014. I remember the year well. Our son was born. I turned forty. I flew over 100,000 miles for work. So many memories. But perhaps most salient is the sound of my car starting, followed by an unfamiliar vocal harmony from a song that I did not know, playing through my phone’s bluetooth and into the car’s speakers. It annoyed me. Every. Single. Time. This was not a song I chose. It was not a song I remembered downloading. But I could not figure out how to stop it. It was several months before I realized that it was "California (There Is No End to Love)" from U2’s “Songs of Innocence.” “Why was this song on my phone?” I wondered. “Oh right -- that Apple / U2 free album promotion.” “Why is this song -- the third song on that album -- always the one that plays first when I start my car?” “How do I delete it?” It took me weeks to solve the maddening mystery. I never once listened to that song to completion and semi-vowed to never listen to that album from a band that I had once admired and adored.
The colossal disaster that was the Apple / U2 “Songs of Innocence” campaign has been thoroughly considered by music critics, business writers and technologists. And yet, it might bear some repeating: In conjunction with the announcement and release of Apple’s iPhone 6, all iTunes customers received a free digital download of the new U2 album. Said album would simply appear one day in their “Purchased Products” folder. Apple and U2 did not ask for a dime. No real effort required. Just a lovely, generous, healthy new carton of milk at your doorstep, as Apple and the band once famously suggested.
Months after the debacle, Bono appropriately realized that some people in the world might not want milk. They might be vegan. And that, moreover, what his band had done with Apple was more like taking a carton of milk, unlocking the door of five hundred million homes and placing it in each refrigerator with a note that said “you’re welcome.” People were furious. There was a sense that the album was akin to fancy spam. For some of the 1980s and 90s, U2 was universally beloved and considered the most important band in the world, a trophy they had inherited from The Clash. Amazingly, Apple and U2 had managed to undo all of their good will and annoy roughly 5% of the Earth’s population with just the click of a few buttons.
It wasn’t just iTunes customers. Musicians hated the gesture, as well, suggesting that the free music promotion would further cheapen the value of their work products. It was likened to a new model of prostitution, wherein the services were not paid for by clients but somehow the employee got a new car from their pimp. It seemed perverse and not sustainable. Critics, meanwhile, largely dismissed the album as flaccid and the promotion as desperate. To make matters worse, Jann Wenner, the published of Rolling Stone, strong-armed his editorial team and ranked the album as the de facto best of 2014. "My dictate. By fiat, buddy. That's that,” he would later write. “Songs of Innocence” was proof that medium is entirely the message. And, in this case, a significant portion of the civilized world experienced the medium as a botched cyber crime.
“Songs of Innocence” was a disaster in making as much as it was in its promotion. It had been five years since “No Line on The Horizon,” an album that was ravaged by critics and nearly disowned by the band themselves. For over a decade, U2 had been trying to reimagine themselves. They were no longer the young, idealistic, cathedral rockers. They were older, wiser and more studied. They seemingly wanted to be something either more artful or danceable or both. For a band that had so famously succeeded on the basis of vibe and tone more than style or structure, this evolution proved elusive. The journey from “Pop” to “No Line on The Horizon” was slow and arduous. It was not without its hits or successes. After all, this was still the same four men that had made “Bad,” “One” and a handful of the very best Rock songs of the last forty years. But you got the sense that time and context had shifted for the band in some irretrievable way. There were whispers that even Bono, in his charming but endless narcissism, was wondering if U2 could still be relevant. By 2014, Reagan and Bush were gone. America had Barrack Obama and War on Drugs and Sturgill Simpson. What did we need U2 for?
This existential struggle spilled over to the many recording sessions that would eventually birth “Songs of Innocence.” Between 2009 and the album’s eventual release, the follow up to “No Line on The Horizon” took roughly five different forms. First there was the planned “Songs of Ascent,” a spiritual follow-up to “Horizon” that never materialized. Then there were sessions of purported club bangers that were led by Rick Rubin. Similarly, these tracks never saw the light of day. Simultaneously, Bono and The Edge considered making an album that would include and extend their work for the Broadway disaster, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”
In late 2010, having put all of the aforementioned ideas on the back burner, U2 entered the studio with Danger Mouse, who was coming off of buzzy work with Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley, The Black Keys and Beck. The Danger Mouse sessions proved fertile but incomplete. The band seemed inclined to take the songs to their finish line but there was also a sense of ambivalence -- that they might not have the scale or import of previous U2 work. So, they called in Ryan Tedder, Paul Epworth, Declan Gaffney, and Flood to complete the work that they had substantially made with Danger Mouse. These final sessions may have been more tinkering and confidence building than creatively significant. It is hard to tell. However, towards the end of 2014, Danger Mouse was called back into the studio for finishing touches and, after one last delay to polish up and add an eleventh song, “Songs of Innocence” arrived in our iPhones and iPods.
Although I would hear one part of one song from the album dozens of times in 2014, it would take me six years to revisit “Songs of Innocence.” It had been nearly two decades since I closely followed the band or awaited their new music. I never really turned my back on them. I simply veered off in another direction. As a result, I had barely read any of the proper reviews of the album in 2014. But, in 2021, I was vaguely aware that there had been some recent, more generous reconsideration. Stripped of its pernicious package and bungled marketing campaign, the album seemed ready for reclamation. And, stripped of my own need to be traveling for business or changing diapers, I similarly felt ready to reintegrate my own cyber-crime PTSD.
Steeled and teeth clenched, I finally sat down and listened to “Songs of Innocence.” Then I listened again. By the third time, I had concluded that this was no monster. By the fourth time, I began to think that it was pretty good in parts and, possibly, great in others. Then I listened to my favorite Coldplay songs (there aren’t that many). Then I listened to the first two Gorillaz albums. Then I listened to The Black Keys’ “Attack and Release.” Then I went back to U2’s “War” and “The Unforgettable Fire.” Then, I was ready to write. 2014 was no longer the memory. The album existed in the present and it was clearly an excellent Rock and Roll record. It was not a masterpiece. It was not among the band’s best five albums. But its dismissal, necessitated by its own promotion, clearly shortchanged the accomplishment. “Songs of Innocence” was the culmination of a trajectory wherein the band was evidently interested in The White Stripes (or The Black Keys, to a lesser extent) but it also finds themselves frequently sounding like U2 imitating Coldplay imitating U2.
The derivative nature of “Songs of Innocence” is in part a byproduct of market correction, wherein Coldplay and many others, tried their best to approximate U2 (and Radiohead). However, It is also a symptom of U2’s restlessness and their desire to progress, even beyond their profound success. While some of the record sounds styled by Danger Mouse -- the fuzzed out guitar and bass and the cut and past collage here and there -- U2 can never really sound too much like another band. They are, after all, the only group to have survived forty years with the same four members intact. And -- to state the obvious -- nobody plays guitar quite like the Edge, bass like Adam Clayton or drums like Larry Mullen Jr. And, try as they may, nobody sings even vaguely like Bono.
These blessings, and especially those of their frontman, are also clearly their curse. Bono’s high-mindedness, his messianic tendencies and his endless belief in the power of music (his music) to heal, resulted in a public persona that is beloved by some and is insufferable to many. A big part of the backlash against “Songs of Innocence” was undoubtedly a backlash against Bono. But this bias, and the recency bias that more broadly plagues music criticism, obscured an important reality: In 2014, U2 was still one of the greatest bands on the planet. If “Songs of Innocence” had been released under the name “Elbow” or “The Doves,” it would have be heralded as a quantum leap forward. It also would have been received as more contemporary and novel. For all their histrionics, Coldplay may not have five songs in their discography that are better than the five best on “Songs of Innocence.” And, as likable and talented as Dave Grohl and The Foo Fighters are, I think something similar could be said about them. This is nothing against Coldplay or The Foo Fighters. Rather, it’s a sobering reminder of how towering U2 is and how negatively biased we had become by 2014.
Though not necessarily an advantage, “Songs of Innocence” is the most explicitly “personal” U2 album. For decades, the band made music that fans wanted to believe was about everything, but critics feared might be about nothing at all. On “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone),” however, Bono returns to that moment in the 1977 when Punk Rock, in general, and Joey Ramone, in particular, gave them religion. In four minutes, we get everything that is great and everything that is not on the album. It opens with a collage of choir and clickity-clack percussion that gives way to a guitar and drum that have been processed through the Danger Mouse machine. Bono comes in and his voice sounds slightly compressed. It’s all startling and a long way from the church guitar chime and cathedral Rock depths of their past. The track sounds readymade for either for a Pepsi commercial or for a younger act that was inspired by The White Stripes. And yet, snark aside, it’s a good song and a great radio single. In 2014, however, as we defended ourselves against the Apple campaign and the siege of our iPhones, none of this mattered.
The most autobiographical songs on “Songs of Innocence” are generally the ones that miss the mark. On “Song for Someone,” Bono looks back at the precious, awkward beauty of his own young love but, from this very personal memory, conjures a fairly generic, first wedding dance, Coldplay-ish track. There is a hesitance in how Bono approaches the personal that stands in stark contrast with the glorious abandon of how he dares to be universal. On “Iris (Hold Me Close)” he sings about his mother, who passed away when he was just fourteen, after she suffered a brain aneurysm at her own father’s funeral. That sort of tragedy would be hard to approach for any writer or artist and Bono sounds appropriately cautious and ambivalent. He nurses the song and skates on the surface of something that feels impossibly fragile. U2 does “heroic” better than most any band ever has. They proved on “One” that they could also do “vulnerable.” “Fragile” however, seems to be the line that they cannot effectively cross.
When the band takes one step back, into history or biography that is personal but not too personal, they fare much better. “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight” is a haunting and effective comment on sexual abuse and denial in the Catholic church. And "This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now" is an unexpectedly winning blend of club beats with hints of Reggae in homage to Joe Strummer, the band’s consensus spirit animal. It is a fitting homage -- every bit as uplifting and worldly as the subject himself. “Raised by Wolves” and “Cedarwood Road” both travel back to Dublin in the 1970s, at moments of creative and literal detonations. Both tracks nearly manage capture the weight of their settings. However, both would also have benefitted from the unabashed grandeur and vibe of U2 in the 80s. Stuck between the constraints of song and the experimentation of their ideas, neither of these two take flight.
Throughout the album, the pastiche nature of the work -- having been made over several years with several producers -- is hard not to notice. You can sense that bridges and choruses have been cut, copied and pasted. You notice when some extra guitar or distortion is dropped in for effect. Most of the time, these decisions prove to be acceptable or, even, additive. But they give the cumulative sense of a band struggling to find what they are looking for and resorting to studio technology to offset a lack of revelation. The biggest victim of this (self-imposed) tinkering is likely Bono, who, in his worst moments, sounds like a middle-aged crooner trying to sound like younger Bono.
One refreshing exception to the vocal harness is “Volcano,” which was nearly left off the album. Finished in the days after the album was actually due to their label and to Apple, it is possible that the lack of time and lack of interference helped. Just over three minutes long, the song has a thick, familiar bass, a whiff of the Edge’s famous chime, and Bono doing his very best Karen O imitation. The song is very linear. It simply progresses. No studio wizardry to function as speed bumps. Bono and the band just go. And it’s great fun. “The Troubles” takes ones final look back to Ireland of their youth. With its sweeping melody and unadorned vocal performances, shared between Bono and Lykki Li, U2 closes the album with a plainly uplifting Pop song about how music can save us from hate. It’s not romantic like “The Sweetest Thing.” It’s not cloying like “Beautiful Day,” or aching like “One” or inspirational like “Pride (In the Name of Love.” But it is a little bit of all of those things.
Six years after its release, “Songs of Innocence” is nowhere to be found on my iPhone. Well, at least not in my downloads. It is, thankfully, still there, along with millions of lesser albums, in Spotify. And while I don’t expect to play the album in full again any time soon, I can proudly admit that I did recently get into my very sensible Subaru, enjoy the quiet, and then press play on "California (There Is No End to Love).” Once I got past the opening Beach Boys’ harmony that had tormented me and my phone in 2014, I started driving and exhaled something in between relief and pleasure. Like all things U2, you may hate the drama, but you also really love the drama.