That’s a kind of magic trick, and realizing that of course all the problems that we find in the exterior world are just manifestations of what we, you know, what we hold inside of us, in our interior worlds. These last two albums mix up the personal and the political so that you don’t know which one you’re talking to. I mean, it’s not for everybody – and it can’t be for us all the time. Songs of Experience just debuted at Number One on the albums chart, which means you’ve had a chart-topping album in every decade from the Eighties on. All that promotion takes a lot more work than I remember, but if you believe in the songs, you have to defend and present them. ![]() And then we were preparing for Songs of Experience. They are very demanding in terms of their emotional – what word am I looking for . . . forthrightness. Stepping inside the songs was more of an ordeal than I thought it would be. I gave myself to the singing in new ways, but there wasn’t a lot of going out and discovering the places we were playing, the cities that we were playing, which I really love to do. We ended with four nights in Sao Paulo, in front of, I think, nearly 300,000 people, and it was quite the crescendo.īut if I am honest – and I probably should be in this interview – I haven’t quite recovered from it. That was the conceit, and it got better and better. We felt that its strength was that it had meaning, maybe even more meaning now than it did then. So there were no old Super 8 films or anything to give the sense of that time. The stance that we took was as if we had just put out The Joshua Tree the week before. Nostalgia is something U2 like to avoid, so what was it like going out and playing an old album every night? As always, he remains an optimist – and one of rock’s greatest talkers, full of wit and candor and poetry. He is the rarest of rock stars – an artist and an activist in the same measure. Bono continues to pour his energy into global causes, meeting with world leaders and working on behalf of his ONE Campaign, which fights extreme poverty. U2 remain hungry – for new approaches to songwriting, for finding their place in the age of streaming, for a new tour planned for the spring. What shines through as much as anything is his ambition, which burns as brightly as ever. In person, Bono is warm, engaging and thoughtful, even while discussing difficult subjects. ![]() We conducted the interview over two sessions at the kitchen table of my New York apartment, around the corner from Bono’s own place in the city.
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