Songs of Surrender Part 2 - U2 coping with Covid?
Continuing with Ian Ryan’s two-year anniversary retrospective of U2’s Songs of Surrender, here is a look at the second disc.
Covid affected everyone. It’s easy to think that because U2 are fantastically wealthy and generally healthy that Covid might not have as much of an impact on them as on others - but that’s imagining what other people are thinking, and I’m not a telepath. I can view Songs of Surrender as a crass, uncreative cash-grab, and a marketing tool to buoy both Bono’s Surrender tour and the band’s residency at the Sphere.
But wealth and comfort doesn’t automatically protect someone from depression, stress, and fatigue. In the years during and since Covid, I definitely found myself acting … differently at times due to the pressures and uncertainties of it all - and I didn’t have the expectation of releasing a new album on my shoulders. As a thought exercise, what if this album was their way of working through what had come from the Covid years?
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Disc 2 - Larry
11. “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses”
I’ve always preferred the “Temple Bar Edit” of this song over the Achtung Baby album version. It is perhaps U2’s best pop song ever, and the SoS mix retains a lot of the pop buoyancy of the “Temple Bar Edit.” It’s just sad that “Wild Horses” never became a karaoke staple…
12. “Get Out of Your Own Way”
Well, this was a choice. “Get Out of Your Own Way” was a pretty good song on Songs of Experience, brought a little low by the “Lincoln’s ghost” line and more than redeemed by the overtly political music video. This is maybe the worst song on all four SoS discs. Bono forgets to sing and talks his way through most of the song, and it just sounds bad. The vibe is that of some drunk folks who pulled out their acoustic instruments, and not in a fun, campfire way.
13. “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”
Like “Every Breaking Wave” on disc one, this stripped-down interpretation of the song is well-trodden territory. U2 released an acoustic version of “Stuck in a Moment” on the 7 EP, and it has regularly been played live. However, this arrangement suits the song so much better than the piano version of “Every Breaking Wave.” If you have to choose, go with the original acoustic version over the SoS version. Good vibes either way though.
14. “Red Hill Mining Town”
U2 have been rethinking this song for a while now. It was originally going to be the second single off The Joshua Tree, but got shelved. Over the past decade, two music videos came our way, the song was reworked by Steve Lillywhite for the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree (Bono used the same cheat as he did in the SoS version of “Pride,” borrowing his younger self’s vocals for the chorus), and the Lillywhite revamp informed its live arrangement on the Joshua Tree 2017 tour, which then made its way to SoS. If you listen to the four versions in order, you can hear how each is descended from the prior incarnation. Horns are added, the percussion becomes more ‘military,’ and the song becomes increasingly somber and feebly funereal. The most recent is an interesting interpretation, but a song about a town that’s dying over time now feels like it has been dying in front of us with each new version, slower and less vital each time.
15. “Ordinary Love”
Another song that U2 has kept working on over the years. This is the fifth version of the song they have released that seems derived from the original core song, not as a full-on remix. It’s like they know they have the heart of a solid song, but can’t ever quite find the right angle to approach it. For my money, the “Epworth Mix” was the best.
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The Edge’s influence over U2 has really made itself known during the “Surrender” era of the band. Edge seems to have unofficially designated himself as the band’s caretaker of their past. U2 say they have a primary library of their content that they go to for re-releases, remasters, updated versions, and whatnot. The Edge keeps his own collection on CD as well, by his own reporting. Bono and The Edge went into this with David Fricke on SiriusFM:
The Edge: “And so, when we went to look at what we might be able to add to the anniversary release of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, we sorta did a, well I did a deep dive into my CD collection of outtakes.”
Bono: “People call Edge the Mother Teresa of lost songs. He is the archaeologist of the band, and he did it, an archaeological dig.”
The Edge: “Yeah, I did. You know those guys that hang out in Egypt and they sort, you know they, they’re looking for Tutankhamen’s tomb, I’m that guy in U2. I’m like, ‘I remember! I remember that riff!’ and I’ll go off and I’ll find it.”
The Edge is the producer of SoS, he is the primary instrumentalist, and he takes over much more of the singing than normal on SoS. He wrote the album introduction in the liner notes and re-wrote lyrics to suit his own new needs. Between this album and How To Re-Assemble An Atomic Bomb, The Edge has stopped being shy about showing just how much of U2’s creative process comes from him.
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16. “Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own”
The Atomic Bomb original of this is a lush, heavily-produced song that gets stripped down to just a piano track for most of the SoS version, and the song more than shines for it. In the SoS liner notes, the Edge says that the goal of SoS is to find the essence of the songs: “The essence of those songs still lives in us. But how to reconnect with that essence when the band have changed and grown so much?... Intimacy replaced post-punk urgency… A great song, it turns out, is kind of indestructible. Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version each song started to open up to a new authentic voice…” With this mission statement in mind, “Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own” thrives. Bono doesn’t skimp on the vocals, the core melody of the song is unshakable, and this arrangement suits the song superbly. This is one of the best arguments on the whole album for the SoS experiment.
17. “Invisible”
This is another example of where the SoS experiment succeeds. “Invisible” is one of U2’s best songs, and this version shows its quality when compared to the Songs of Innocence version. On SoI it’s mechanical, echoing, icy-cold and smooth. The SoS interpretation is close, huddled, warm and personal. I prefer the former, but the SoS version still shines as one of the gems on the album. If you want a real treat, go watch the arrangement that Bono and The Edge performed for David Letterman in Dublin on their Disney+ A Sort of Homecoming special.
18. “Dirty Day”
The new arrangement of this song would be right at home on Bono’s solo Surrender tour. An intense, angry song on Zooropa becomes much of a muchness here. It loses a lot of its personality and becomes yet another track on this very long album. A shame.
19. “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)”
This isn’t a bad interpretation, but I don’t know what the point of it is. It has a decent swagger and “Viva La Ramone” finally finds its official place in the U2 catalog. U2 have released four versions of this song: the SoI album track, the “Busker version” from the SoI deluxe album, the more ethereal remix played at the end of some Experience + Innocence tour shows, and the SoS reimagining. This one strays too far from the original purpose of the song, from the celebration and youthful bombast, and the song is left lacking.
20. “City of Blinding Lights”
I’m terribly biased about this song. The Atomic Bomb album version is my favorite U2 song ever, and this arrangement was the first live song I heard after the years of Covid lockdowns, in San Francisco on Bono’s solo tour. Hearing it after all the stress, mental breakdowns, and weariness of the Covid years left me near tears. It was such a relief, such an unloading of all that weight. This version loses a lot of the ‘big city’ majesty of the album version, but it still retains the hope and wide-eyed ambition of it. There is nothing analytical in my opinion of this song, only emotional: this is a lovely, lovely triumph on SoS.
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Walking through the skyway from the Venetian casino toward the Sphere and inside the Sphere itself, ethereal versions of Achtung Baby songs were played over the sound system, even in the bathrooms. It was these versions I wanted intensely. I wanted the band to release them as a fan club exclusive or an EP or something. Why didn’t I feel the same way about Songs Of Surrender?
They were all released in the same year, and they all were officially created by U2, but I felt turned off by much of SoS as much as I was turned on by the mixes playing in the Sphere.
Maybe it was the live setting; maybe it was because the Achtung Baby mixes at the Sphere felt like they had more of a purpose; maybe they were just more interesting. Maybe it was all three. I’m not sure I’ll ever know.
©Ryan/U2 and Us, 2025