Although it officially started a little over a month ago, much of the eastern region of the United States got their first real taste of the winter this past weekend, as some spots saw as much as 31 inches of snow. Of course, the wild weather got me thinking about a couple of U2 songs, […]
Read MoreU2101 – The Sweetest Thing
U2’s “The Sweetest Thing” is, in my experience, one of the band’s most polarizing songs. Folks seem to fall into one of two camps – either they love the song or they hate it. At the heart of the matter seems to be the listener’s feelings on pop music, which makes sense to me because […]
Read MoreU2101 – Miracle Drug
One of my favorite radio appearances by U2 in the last decade or so was the short set that they played for Zane Lowe’s nightly show on BBC Radio 1. The band played four songs from the yet-to-be-released How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and then closed the set with a dynamite performance of “Beautiful […]
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U2101 – When Love Comes to Town
I don’t remember where I saw it now, but a few years ago I read a list that inventoried the greatest rock ‘n’ roll singers of all time. Bono was number 3 on that list, behind Freddie Mercury and Robert Plant, and while I don’t necessarily agree that Bono ranks behind those other luminaries, at […]
Read MoreU2101 – Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad
I think that it’s a real shame that Frank Sinatra never got around to recording “Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad”, the song that Bono and Edge wrote for him, while he was still alive. I wonder what Ol’ Blue Eyes thought of the song, and whether it hitting so close to home […]
Read MoreU2101 – Looking Back and Ahead
So it seems that U2’s Innocence + Experience Tour is done and over with, at least for now. “What’s next for the band” is the question on all our hearts and minds, so I thought that today I’d take a stab at playing fortune teller and try to guess what the next little bit of […]
Read MoreU2101 – People Have the Power
When U2 returned to Paris on Sunday to play the first of the two shows that were postponed in the wake of last month’s horrible terrorist attacks, emotion and sentiment ran high. It was no surprise, therefore, that the band had something special up their sleeves – an appearance by New York singer / songwriter […]
Read MoreU2101 – With or Without You
“With or Without You” is another one of those songs that U2 will probably never stop playing live, and I suppose that there’s good reason for that. If I had to choose one song to name as U2’s signature cut, it would probably be this hit from 1987 – their very first American number one. […]
Read MoreU2101 – Mysterious Ways
In the fall of 2002, around the time that U2’s Best of 1990-2000 came out, I was working at a record store in Cincinnati, Ohio. I remember that during the first time I played the store’s promotional copy over the in-store stereo system, when “Mysterious Ways” came on, one of the girls I worked with said “I […]
Read MoreU2101 – Bad
Today I am writing about what I believe to be the greatest song ever recorded – U2’s “Bad”, from The Unforgettable Fire. When I was in college, I once wrote an essay about this song for a class, and I was never quite happy with what I turned in. It’s bugged me for years, so […]
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