U2 Songs of Surrender

The veteran rockers have reworked 40 of their classic hits for the record - which is a companion piece to frontman Bono's memoir 'Surrender' - and guitarist The ...

Imagine walking into your living room and all your stuff is there, but it's different. The sofa has moved, the bookcase is leaning on a different wall and .

In a new Pride (In the Name of Love), Bono's voice has been harnessed and tamed, losing the original's stridency and anger. One effect of the album is to put Bono's lyrics under a spotlight, making his words and imagery more pronounced. Some don't work, as when the grimness of Red Hill Mining Town is undercut by horns, effectively remaking it into a defanged children's song. One of the band's earliest hits — “11 O'Clock Tick Tock” — is smoother, slower and cleaner than the original. The reworked With or Without You has an air of antiseptic menace. That's the point of this exercise led by Bono and The Edge.

Songs of Surrender finds the Dublin band remaking no fewer than 40 of their songs. The concept is linked to Bono's recently published memoir Surrender, whose 40 ...

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With their first release in six years, Ireland's Finest reinterpret forty (!) songs from their catalog—a big swing from a group that's never been afraid to take ...

The Edge has said that Songs of Surrender was made with the awareness that most people listen through earbuds now, which is a telling explanation of the trade-off being made on Songs of Surrender. Author and music journalist Alan Light is the former Editor-in-Chief of Vibe and Spin magazines. It’s obvious to say that the earliest and latest material benefits more than the big hits, since most of us are less invested in them, and because the underwhelming response to U2’s last few albums means there are still gems to uncover (“Cedarwood Road” is certainly a keeper, though “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” is an improved arrangement of a still-uninteresting song). “Get Out of Your Own Way” adds a charmingly knockabout groove, while “Two Hearts Beat As One” (one of four songs featuring Edge as lead singer) gets lightly disco-fied. (Songs from almost [all fourteen of their albums](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/g28448100/best-u2-albums-ranked/) are included; nothing from 1981’s October or 2009’s No Line on the Horizon made the cut.) [Elvis](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/g32668583/elvis-presley-life-in-photos/) in the boxing ring on the “comeback special” to the MTV Unplugged series to pretty much every time Bob Dylan steps on stage.

The collaborative project U2SOS40, featuring 40 new visual interpretations of U2's music, has been launched by Island Records and Interscope to mark the ...

[U2](https://www.udiscovermusic.com/artist/u2/)’s music, has been launched by Island Records and Interscope to mark the release today (17) of the band’s [Songs of Surrender](https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/u2-announce-new-album-songs-of-surrender/) album. [Pride](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/faw4nbi0T18) [Sunday Bloody Sunday](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tc2fuvPFsCs) The Irish Examiner asks: “What is left when you strip everything away? [Forty artists and creators](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL80sr_OFD9CEFSpXyOd9ePokYOzxIUdOO) from around the world were invited to create a 60-second piece of content, each of them soundtracked by one of the new recordings from the album. [The record](https://u2.lnk.to/U2sos), featuring 40 of their most seminal songs re-recorded and reimagined, has been praised as “a stunning showcase” and “ uniquely revealing and emotionally resonant.” [Shop the best of U2’s discography on vinyl and more](https://shop.udiscovermusic.com/collections/u2).

The veteran rockers have reworked 40 of their classic hits for the record - which is a companion piece to frontman Bono's memoir 'Surrender' - and guitarist The ...

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Jennifer Duck is an assistant professor of media studies at Belmont University and a two-time Emmy award winner. Dr. Christa Ballard Tooley is the academic ...

in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has spent the last 15 years as a professor studying, writing and teaching about social, cultural and political life. It’s a calling for a divided world, and it’s time for us to tune in. “Listen to the shouters as well as the whisperers. The folk music revival of the 1960s and 1970s brought traditional Irish music to the United States and expanded the reach of many Irish rebel songs. In Ireland and Northern Ireland, the song’s critique of both sides put U2 in the bard’s familiar hot seat. In 1998, when truce was on the table, U2 played in Belfast to endorse the Good Friday Agreement. “It was actually dangerous in the sense that on hearing it, some people wanted to hurt us,” Bono writes in his memoir. The album and a Disney+ documentary round out a trifecta of retrospectives from the band, kicked off when lead singer Bono released his best-selling book, “Surrender,” in November. In U2’s homeland of Ireland, centuries of English colonization made telling the history of Ireland a deeply political and potentially subversive act. One of U2’s most popular singles, “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” which lamented both a 1972 massacre and the Troubles’ normalizing of violence in Northern Ireland, generated a raucous enthusiasm in Americans that Bono found unnerving. U2 came of age during a bloody, 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, which killed 3,500 people and wounded 30,000 more. Adorned with 22 Grammys — more than any other duo or group — U2 is reimagining and reworking 40 original recordings based on these themes on their new album “Songs of Surrender,” released this St.

U2 guitarist The Edge approached working on 'Songs of Surrender' as a "fun experiment".

With “Songs of Surrender,” an album of 40 reimagined songs, and “A Sort of Homecoming,” a documentary on Disney+, the Irish band pauses to reflect.

But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. [“Out of Control,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4u83iwMTpU) which in 1979 had jabbing, buttonholing electric guitar and bass lines, has become a cozy, cheerfully strummed self-affirmation, very much in control. “Songs of Surrender” does have a few clever second thoughts about U2’s catalog. The remakes on “Songs of Surrender” often strip away too much. One of U2’s enduring strengths has been the way its songs ennoble yearning and turbulence. In the 1990s, leery of its own pretensions, U2 remade itself with electronic beats and artifice until it came to a dead end with its 1997 album, “Pop.” In the 2000s, it circled back to rock beats and sincerity, but its music was pervasively infused with the latest technology. And the more we’ve taken a song to heart, the more its sonic details resonate. “Unplugged” was MTV’s tribute to the recording-business cliché that a great song only needs chords and a voice to reveal its quality, as if everything else is embellishment. “A Sort of Homecoming” also digresses, pointlessly, with attempts at comedy recalling Letterman’s “Late Show” shticks. “Songs of Surrender” is an act of renunciation, drastically scaling down songs that once strove to shake entire stadiums. In a startling change, the band will have a substitute drummer, Bram van den Berg, rather than Mullen, who has been dealing with injuries to his [elbows, knees and neck](https://www.iheart.com/content/2022-12-05-larry-mullen-jr-has-fans-wondering-if-he-plans-to-leave-u2/). And now, in the pandemic era, U2 is looking back even further.

Roll your eyes if you want (and plenty will) — but the Irish icons' four-disc collection of 40 reimagined classics is far more enjoyable and satisfying than you ...

The Edge adds: “Hearing the songs interact, and finding the running orders for the four albums was really thrilling; finding the surprising segues, getting a chance to DJ. The Edge says of the project: “Music allows you to time travel, and we became curious to find out what it would be like to bring our early songs back with us to the present day and give them the benefit, or otherwise, of a 21st century reimagining. What started out as an experiment quickly developed into a personal obsession as so many of our songs yielded to a new interpretation.