"Where The Streets Have No Name" and "With Or Without You" by U2
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In the studio, a recording engineer might need to put walls between musicians to minimize sound bleed. Those walls are called gobos. Gobos can be extremely helpful for getting clean, isolated recordings, but the real reason to use them is because you get to say that word a bunch of times. ♪

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad that you've joined me for another season talking about music recorded with gobos, without gobos, and with or without gobos.

It'll make sense in a minute. This is, as always, an entirely listener-supported show, and thank you so much to everyone who supports Strong Songs on Patreon. If you want to chip in and start getting each episode two weeks early, go to patreon.com slash strong songs.

On this season premiere, we're taking on two songs by one of the best-known bands in the world. And combined, these songs have a lot to say to one another and a lot to say to us about how music gets made. So let's plug in the Strat, fire up the delay, and hit the streets. ♪

There is no one standard way to write a song. Sometimes a single person sits down at an instrument and writes the entire thing in one whack. Sometimes one person writes the lyric and someone else writes the music. Or one person writes one part of the song and then brings on their collaborative partner to write the other part.

and sometimes a whole group of people, musicians, producers, engineers, they all get together and they bang it out in the studio day after day until they finally decide they're done and realize they've made something beautiful together.

On this season premiere, I want to talk about not one but two songs that resulted from that kind of process undertaken by one of the most famous bands in the world. To me, these two songs are so fascinatingly similar despite being completely different, and that allows for an unusual insight into the way this band makes music.

We'll be talking, of course, about Irish superstars U2 and their landmark 1987 record The Joshua Tree, which kicks off with a song that's so closely associated with U2 at this point that I wouldn't be surprised if they performed it at every concert in the decades since they wrote it. All the streets have known, all the streets have known, we're still building them walls.

But while I love Where the Streets Have No Name and could have just done an entire episode about just that song, I wanted to try something a bit different here for the season 7 premiere. See, I've always thought of the first three songs on Joshua Tree as a bit of a suite. It helps that they're all super famous. I mean, all three of them are songs that are inextricably linked to U2. Where the Streets Have No Name goes first, then comes I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For...

And third comes With or Without You, a song that I really like, and the more I learned it, the more I realized that it has so much in common with Where the Streets Have No Name that I can't help but think of them as two halves of the same whole. See the stone set in your eyes See the thorn twist in your side

The similarities may not be immediately apparent to you just hearing these two little bits of each song, but trust me, they're there, and they're pretty cool. I think that these two songs placed alongside one another offer a really cool look inside the intense creative collaboration that resulted in the Joshua Tree. With or without you With or without

Similar ideas made their way into two very different songs, so the finished album is a real musical ecosystem filled with echoes, offshoots, and spiraling recursion.

This episode will focus on both Where the Streets Have No Name and With or Without You. And for this episode, I'm going to try something a bit different. Instead of just going through each song bit by bit and recreating each part, I'm going to take a wider view, bouncing back and forth between the two songs to get a sense of how they were written, how they fit together, and what kinds of creative impulses they reflect.

The Joshua Tree was released in the spring of 1987. It was the fifth album by U2. It was produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lenoir, a pair of names familiar to any regular listeners of Strong Songs. Eno, as the visionary composer and producer who shaped much of the sound of the song,

of the 1980s and beyond, and Lenoir as a similarly influential guitarist and producer who, among other things, produced Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes and the rest of his album So, which actually kicked off last season of the show.

The songs on Joshua Tree were collaboratively composed by both producers as well as all four members of U2. Vocalist Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, guitarist David Howell Evans, known as The Edge, bassist Adam Clayton, and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. They recorded most of the album in a converted house in their home of Ireland rather than in a traditional recording studio. We went into the sessions with some...

fairly well developed material. Some stuff that was, you know, getting there but really needed some work. And then we knew that we would end up doing some work where we would all just be in the room playing together and we start getting something and we work from that beginning and develop it into a song.

That's The Edge in the 1999 Classic Albums documentary about the making of The Joshua Tree, describing the general approach the band took to writing all of the songs on the album. Lanois underscored what Edge was saying about that collaborative nature and the way the band worked together in the studio's main room.

yeah um there's something that happens when you two bash it out in the band room you know we have this kind of a setup you know where it's more quiet and and community communicative um then then there's the other room where the volume is is way up and sometimes things get out of control sonically in a good way out of control in the sense that that

You don't know what it is anymore. It just takes on a life of its own and it makes people do things. Where the Streets Have No Name, which would eventually go down as one of the greatest album openers of all time, originated as an experiment The Edge was doing with his multi-track recorder and a delay pedal, looping a 6/8 delayed guitar figure without really having a clear path toward turning that idea

into an actual song. He must have known he had something, so he brought the tape into the session with the rest of the band, and they started trying to work it out and sort of rest it into shape. After a somewhat torturous process, including Brian Eno's aborted attempt to erase the tapes and start fresh, they finally shaped it into something that worked. Where the streets have known Where the streets have known We're still building them over there with you

With or Without You resulted from a similarly torturous process, albeit with slightly different particulars. The main chord progression came from Bono this time, and the band went through several iterations before they found a version that they were happy with. Bono wound up working on the song outside of the band with the Irish singer Gavin Friday, and those two finally started to turn it into something. Then Brian Eno picked their version up and expanded the arrangement,

and The Edge incorporated a new musical invention, which we'll get to, that added a crucial little bit of extra sound to the song, and one of U2's most enduring hits was born. ♪ Give yourself, give yourself, give yourself ♪

So let's get into it. There is a lot to talk about with each of these songs, and I'm going to thread my analysis of each one together, since, like I said, I think of these opening tracks almost like one big composition. Each of these songs has an instantly iconic introduction, though they each work very differently. Let's start where the album starts, with the intro to Where the Streets Have No Name.

So what is there to say about one of the most famous song intros of all time? Where the streets have no name begins not with the Edge's famous guitar riff, nor with Larry Mullen's signature driving drum part. It begins instead with ambience. Likely created by Brian Eno, I'd at least call this sound Eno-esque, it's a reverberant mix of synth pads and synth organ that evokes with shimmering clarity a vast cathedral.

So we are in the key of D and that's right where we start with a D major chord which walks down to a G major letting the C sharp linger for a nice Lydian sound then goes to B minor then an A sus chord, a V chord resolving to a D sus and then a D major. They repeat that chord progression again and this time the edges guitar begins to make its way into the mix.

D major to G major sharp four to six minor, that B minor to five resolving to one. Let's go.

Man, it's so good. Okay, we are going to talk about the guitar part. We're going to talk about that guitar sound. We'll get there. But first, I just want to focus on that intro before the edge comes in and on that chord progression in particular. Those four chords which underpin this song, D, one major, G, four major, B minor, the six minor, and A major, the five major.

Many of you will, I'm sure, be correctly clocking those four chords as the four chords. The four chords that underpin a countless number of pop songs. Four chords that form a progression that I've talked about many times on this show. It's been parodied. It's been used to great effect. It's been turned into a popcorn.

And those four chords, I, IV, VI minor, and V, are very important to both songs in this episode, and of course, to this song in particular. I really like what they're doing with them here at the beginning. They're adding these slight embellishments that accentuate the movements between the chords. For example, as the D walks down to B, when the D chord transitions to G major, and then

They linger on that C sharp in the organ, which gives this nice sharp Fort Lydian sound. And of course, on the V chord and the I chord, both are initially suspended chords, which is to say chords where the third chord tone is suspended and turned into the fourth before it resolves down to the third. It's a very familiar sound, even if you didn't know what it was called. And it combines with that organ tone to make the cathedral imagery of this introduction explicit.

Just close your eyes. You can see it. Everyone listening to this episode, everyone hearing these chords at this moment in time, we're all together in the same space. The introduction actually stands in contrast to the rest of the song. It's this atmospheric, gentle introduction to an otherwise relentless, driving song. So I think it makes for an interesting comparison to the intro to With or Without You, which has quite a few similarities. ♪

After a couple of bars of drums, the rest of the band enters. So it's different in some of the particulars, but similar in the abstract. Of course, the pulse is very different. Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton are in on drums and bass from the very start, Mullen playing this sparse groove with only the kick and the snare drum, and with Clayton laying down steady root eighth notes in just about the most straightforward bass line possible.

The Edge, meanwhile, is doing a lot of very cool atmospheric work in this intro and throughout this entire song, mixed with some really neat keyboard textures that Brian Eno added after the fact. But the melodies that the guitar and keyboard are playing are really just embellishing the chord progression laid down by Clayton. And that chord progression is B minor, G major. In other words, 1 to 5 to 6 minor to 4.

The same four chords used in Where the Streets Have No Name placed in a different order and with a very different musical effect. Still the same chords, though. Just goes to show you can take the same musical elements and make two completely different things with them depending on how you go about it.

Okay, so we're talking about two of U2's most famous songs, and that means that we're also talking about two of The Edge's most famous guitar parts. These two songs, to me, embody what makes The Edge a great guitarist. It's his approach to structure and timbre, and his, and to an equal extent his producer's, masterful understanding of space and texture. ♪

The Edge can write a great guitar riff. He can play cool technical parts. He has a great understanding of the instrument. But more often than not, he's less in the business of riffing and more in the business of real estate. He creates spaces in which U2's songs can live. The guitar part on Where the Streets Have No Name is more on the riffy side of things. And actually, during a lot of the song, Edge plays as much of a percussive role as he does a harmonic one.

But it's really about that intro. The intro is the iconic guitar part. It is, pound for pound, probably his most well-known guitar part, to the point that when guitarists say, I want to get that edge sound, I mean, maybe they're cool and they're talking about wire or something, but they're probably talking about this sound. A Fender Strat through a Vox AC30, Dsus chord with a dotted eighth stereo delay, riding across the horizon like a herald of glory.

A long time ago, I made a bonus episode of Strong Songs called Rhythm Plus Harmony Equals Music.

The idea behind the episode was that you can basically think of music along two axes. There's rhythm, which is really just time, and harmony, which is really just frequency. It's a tidy way to think about music, particularly as it's written on the page, and it's a helpful framework for if you're just starting to build your own conception of what music is, at least in a technical sense. However, it leaves out a third element—

Tambour, which is just as important as rhythm and harmony. Tambour means how something sounds, the tonal characteristics of it that make it distinct. After all, a violin playing a D versus a trumpet playing a D versus a saxophone playing a D, those all three sound very different even though they're playing the same note for the same duration.

To put it another way, timbre is why Joni Mitchell, Robert Plant, and Bono could all sing Happy Birthday in the same key with the same notes and rhythms, and each would sound completely distinct. Timbre is why a nylon string guitar plays Bach one way, and an overdriven electric guitar plays the same notes and sounds completely different.

Tambor is at the heart of your tone or your sound. Those words are used almost interchangeably by musicians, and actually the words tone and sound are probably more common than timbre. I certainly talk to other saxophone players about their tone or about their sound. I don't really say, man, I really liked your timbre on that song.

The Edge's sound is so distinct. The timbre of his guitar parts is a huge part of what makes them so special. He puts together really neat parts in terms of the rhythms and the melodies that he chooses, but his tone, and in particular, the variety of tones that he gets and the way that he mixes those tones together, that's central to why he sounds so great. ♪

And as strongly as his guitar playing defines U2's sound, he's actually very choosy about where and when he decides to step to the foreground. If Queen utilized strategic, brand-made deployment, U2 matches them by utilizing judicious edge application. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it? But it feels accurate, so what are you going to do?

So first of all, the actual guitar that he is playing. The Edge has played a number of guitars over the years, but on Joshua Tree and on both of these songs, he is playing a Fender Stratocaster. ♪

I've gone in depth on what makes a Strat sound like a Strat on an episode from a little while back called The Four Electric Guitars, so I won't go too in detail here. But the thing about the Strat is that it has an unusual amount of different sounds right off the bat due to its distinct three-pickup setup.

That means there are five pickup switch positions, each of which sounds pretty distinct, with the exception maybe of the middle one, which I sometimes struggle to pick out. But the other four are very distinct. There's that rounded, bluesy sound of the neck pickup. There's the toothy, hard-to-tame bite of the bridge pickup. ♪

And then there are the two in-between sounds, the second and fourth positions, that get a slightly out-of-phase sound that's often described as quacky. I think that's actually kind of a good word for it. There's the mellow fourth position and the spanky second position, which is probably the most famous of all of the Strat's pickup selector positions. ♪

The Edge is in that position, the second position on this song, and he's putting his guitar through a classic amp, the Vox AC30, which itself has a whole story behind it and is a whole distinct sound, this certain chimey crunch that was a big part of music, especially in the 80s and the 90s. And it adds its own particular flavor to Edge's guitar timbre stew.

This opening figure is based on a D sus chord, like I said, which is to say it's a D major chord with a fourth, a G, in place of the third, the F sharp, though it then resolves to a D major. So the G is constantly becoming an F sharp, and then the F sharp goes back up to a G. He starts up on a high D, and he goes down the chord to the F sharp,

then walks back up to the D, passing by that G on the way, and then back down again. This is a very common kind of sus chord figure.

Now that sounds okay, but remember, the thing with The Edge is the timbre of his guitar playing. And a big part of his particular timbre is in his attack, which, funny enough, is actually related to The Edge on his guitar pick. As I was researching this episode and learning more about U2, I learned that The Edge likes to play guitar with a particular kind of pick.

A guitar pick with a textured bumpy grip that he then turns around and uses for his attack on each string. The bumps on the pick give each articulation this certain brittle scraping sound that once I saw people talking about it, I realized that I've always been able to hear it. It's a small but noticeable aspect of the Edge's guitar sound.

I tracked down some picks with a similar bumpy back. They're made in Germany, so I had to import them. It was totally worth it. And I found that they did actually give me this more sibilant, scraped attack.

Now, importing German guitar picks may seem like overkill, but I really just did it to underline the point that every musician's sound is so personal and so particular to them. And the reason for that is the thousand little decisions like this one that each musician makes when crafting their sound.

Using the rough edge of a textured pick or plugging into a certain amp with a certain set of strings, a certain pickup set at a certain height, it's all part of the human magic of music. The fact that each sound is the culmination of so many small decisions. So we've got the basic tone, and if I play those notes on my guitar in time, it sounds fine. But, you know, it's missing something. So let's put some reverb on it and some delay. ♪

There we go. The delay really is the final piece of the puzzle, and because of how it's arranged in this dotted eighth note pattern, it's this ping-pong effect that adds to the atmosphere, but also adds to the groove. ♪

It's not a complicated guitar part, and as The Edge described, it really just arose out of an experiment he was doing with a delay pedal and turned into this song. But don't let its harmonic and rhythmic simplicity fool you. There's a reason this collection of notes is so instantly identifiable and has become so inextricably connected to this one band at this one moment of time.

It's because of all the small, timbral and arranging decisions made by Edge, as well as by Lanois and Eno, that made this guitar part sound the way that it does. And speaking of distinct guitar parts, Edge's part on With or Without You is just as distinctive as his playing on Where the Streets Have No Name, though he's doing something very different. You can hear the guitar off to the left. ♪

He's holding these incredibly long, sustained notes that stretch out like gossamer across an infinite horizon.

It's such an unusual and distinctive sound, and if I didn't know better, I would have guessed that he was using an Ebo to make that sound. Ebo, of course, a guitarist's tool that I've talked about several times on the show. It's a handheld little device that uses electromagnetics to vibrate a guitar string and isolate certain harmonics, giving an infinitely sustaining note that's really useful for textures and atmospherics, especially with multi-layered guitar parts.

and it gave the Ebo pride of place on loads of pop and rock records since Greg Heat invented it in 1969. That sound that you're hearing is me using an Ebo on my Stratocaster, but of course, it just doesn't quite sound like what The Edge was doing on With or Without You. And that's because The Edge wasn't using an Ebo. He was using something altogether different, an instrument called the Infinite Guitar, which was developed by Michael Brook.

It's actually a whole separate instrument. It's based on a Strat-style guitar, where one of the pickups is broadcasting rather than receiving, which creates a loop between it and the other pickups. And once you've got it all working properly, it lets you play these incredibly fine, sustained tones. Edge's infinite guitar notes combine with Eno's keyboard parts. You can hear that repeating D major triad over on your right.

to bolster his regular Strat parts, which he adds more and more of throughout the song. We'll get into those later. For now, let's move on to these songs' lyrics and melodies, which means it's time to talk about the one band member we haven't really heard from yet. See the stone set in your eyes See the thorn twist in your side for you I'm talking, of course, about Bono himself.

With or without you finds Bono at the very bottom of his vocal register, which is an interesting place for him to be since he's so known for his upper register. And it makes for a helpful contrast with the melody on Where the Streets Have No Name. We're still in the key of D, and the melody revolves mostly around the first three notes of the D major scale. D, E, and F sharp. Through the storm we reach the shore

So it's a very simple melody, just the first three notes of a major scale. But those three notes are incredibly flexible. The first three notes of a major scale are at the heart of everything from nursery rhymes to symphonic masterpieces. And if you take those same three notes in that same key and play them up the octave in a slightly different order, what song does that sound like? I won't see you hide

Yes, not only are Streets and With or Without You in the same key, their melodies revolve around the same group of notes. But Bono is in such a different register for the two songs that you'd never really guess that he's singing the same handful of notes.

Well, the streets are lonely. Combined, the two songs give a real sense of Bono's flexibility as a vocalist and of some of the ways that he uses his instrument, his remarkable instrument, to affect different emotional registers as well as different harmonic ones. Both of these songs follow a non-traditional form. They both just repeat the same sequence of chords over and over, steadily building to an explosive climax.

That's one reason that they work so well live. You have this feeling of just building all together, the audience and the band. I mean, it's definitely one of the things that makes U2 such a great live band. A lot of their songs follow this same songwriting approach. However, the songs are different in terms of the distance that they travel from the start to the peak.

Streets has a more narrow band because it begins in a more intense place. There is less distance to travel from here to here. With or Without You has a lot more room to grow, and as we'll see, it stretches out in more different ways on its journey from here...

To here. So we've already covered some of the basics of each of these songs. We've got the chords, which are pretty much the same on both songs. With or Without You follows the classic four-chords progression of D to A to B minor to G. Where the Streets Have No Name stretches those same chords out and puts them in a different order, going from D...

eventually to G, then up to B minor, and then to A. So same four chords, just different order and a very different energy. Also, Where the Streets Have No Name pulls a very important differentiating trick after that A major. There's one more chord, a C major, the flat seven, which comes at the end of every phrase.

It's a fantastic false resolution. The D major chord that you're expecting doesn't come until the start of the next phrase. I love going to flat seven instead of one. Really great move. I kind of learned it from this song. This is one of the most famous examples of it. Let me just demonstrate. I wanna reach out, touch the flame, where the streets have no

That's kind of where you expect it to go, but that doesn't work at all, right? That has zero juice. Now here's what they actually do. I wanna reach out and touch the flame where the streets have no...

Yeah. It's different in some of the particulars, but it's a similar maneuver to the one that Jimmy Webb pulled at the end of each chorus of another past strong song, Wichita Lineman, as sung by Glen Campbell. You think it's going to resolve to one, and then... It floats away.

Now listen to that C major chord arriving in Where the Streets Have No Name, and you'll have a similar sort of lifted feeling. Instead of landing on solid ground, you float in the air just a little longer, and then you land. So let's hold on Where the Streets Have No Name for a little bit and talk about the ways that the band develops this song.

The second verse is largely the same as the first one, still ending with that C major chord with that lifted, searching feeling. Before the song shifts to a noticeable new gear.

Because this song can't rely on a bridge or an instrumental solo or some other new element to add excitement and a sense of forward motion, the producers in the band have instead opted to steadily grow and elaborate the overall arrangement. Specifically, they're building up the drums and those layered guitar parts from section to section and increasing intensity as they go. Let's start with Larry Mullen Jr.'s drums.

When he first enters, he's playing this steadily driving beat defined almost entirely by drums. And when I say drums, I mean as opposed to cymbals. His low kick drum defining the beat and a collection of higher toms that define the subdivision. I love the sound of these drums. I'm not totally sure what kind of toms these are. There's a variety of them. They're tuned pretty high and they sound really cool.

So just a quick refresher on how I talk about grooves and particularly drum grooves on strong songs. Most grooves in popular music are built out of three components as I see them. There's the thump, the pop, and the sizzle. The thump is down low. It usually defines the beat on a drum set that's usually played on a kick drum, but it can be a lot of other lower, thumpier sounds. The pop offsets the thump. In lots of rock music, that's the backbeat.

usually played on a snare drum and the sizzle fits in between the thumps and the pops that's the subdivision something higher and faster that breaks up the beat and gives it its definition think hi-hat, cymbal, tambourine that sort of thing

So to put this groove in Strong Song's terminology, he's playing a groove that's all thump and sizzle. It's just that the sizzle is being played on toms instead of on cymbals. And there's a much less well-defined pop, at least at the start of the song.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, Mullen isn't the only one contributing to the groove. The Edge's guitar parts are just as percussive as they are harmonic. He's actually a big part of the sizzle on this groove. Let's go back to the start and listen to the drums and the guitar together. They're really in the pocket. It's such a cool groove. It's all about those 16th notes. Do-ka-do-ka-chak, do-ka-do-ka-chak.

The kick drum is doing four on the floor, and Mullen and The Edge are both just all over the 16th notes in between each of those beats. The result is a groove that moves like a freight train and gradually adds emphasis to the backbeat through each phrase. There are several guitar parts overdubbed, and on at least one of them, Edge is just muting his strings and scraping his pick in time with the drums. ♪

So as ever, the notes and the rhythms are one thing, but again, it comes down to timbre, to the way that the instruments all sound. Those particular drums mixed and panned in that particular way. Edge's particular guitar part mixed with that particular delay setting. Mullen develops his drum part as he goes, too. At the very beginning, he's playing almost no backbeat. Then on the second verse, as the Edge begins adding more notes on his guitar part, Mullen begins to emphasize the backbeat.

And finally, when Bono begins a phrase with the title of the song, this is the part of the song that feels the most like a chorus, his snare drum fully comes in with this strong backbeat. Listen to this transition and see if you can pick up all of the new elements that are introduced. Hear that snare drum? And he mixes it up.

And they're at a fully new level for the final verse. The city's afloat.

It kind of sneaks up on you, you know? It starts in this atmospheric, vibey cathedral, and before you know it, you're in this high-energy, exalted place. I don't think most people think of subtlety when they think of U2, but there is a lot of subtlety to this arrangement and to this album overall. A lot of that is no doubt thanks to Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno. This is definitely the same genre.

Daniel Lenoir that just one year earlier was working with Peter Gabriel on his album So with songs like last year's season premiere In Your Eyes. And man, I love that guitar part that The Edge arrives at here at what I guess we could think of as the chorus. He's foreshadowing Bono's melody right before he sings it, and it's a lovely bit of melodic arranging.

Those notes, A, G, F sharp, those are very important notes for both of these songs. In this one, it's the first time that Bono stretches all the way up to an A, which is kind of a power note for him. That's very high and sounds pretty glorious every time he sings it. And it's where he sings, They're still building and burning down love. He really just lays into that A on burning down love.

Burning down love. Listen to how the edge foreshadows that sung melody, and then listen to how his guitar interlocks and interplays with Bono's voice when it's time for him to sing it. Just listen to how the vocals and the guitars mix together. I go there. I go there with you. It's all I can do.

I really love the relationship between these two musicians. And I love how supportive The Edge is and how his guitar parts envelop and hold Bono's voice. Sometimes he springboards Bono on to ever higher and more ecstatic places. And sometimes he just supports him and surrounds him in the lowest and most vulnerable of states. See the stone set in your heart

See the thorn twist in your side for you The history of rock is full of iconic guitarist-singer duos Slash and Axl, Van Halen and Diamond Dave, Ozzy and Zach Wilde, Page and Plant But so many of those partnerships are based on mutual showmanship Guitarists who would step out to take soaring or shredding solos And then step back as the vocalist took center stage

The Edge and Bono's relationship has always struck me as a little bit different, as more organic than that. Edge builds the spaces that Bono inhabits as he sings, and the two often merge and exist as a single musical entity. Neither would feel complete without the other, and I think that's a very special thing about this band. Give yourself up

Bono is also U2's primary lyricist, and while I've chosen to focus on other aspects of these songs for this episode, I do think I should mention just how important lyrics are to the impact of both of these songs. And you

These songs conjure landscapes housing eternal abstract truths. Disappearing dust clouds, poison rain, beds of nails, and twists of fate. These are the kinds of lyrics that you can only really write if you're planning to sing them with a voice like Bono's. ♪

He's one of the only singers who can sell lines like, "We're still building and burning down love," and "Slight of hand and twist of fate, on a bed of nails she makes me wait." Even the titles, "Where the Streets Have No Name" and "With or Without You," these are massive lyrics, they're massive ideas, and they're perfectly suited to such massive songs.

Of course, that's not to downplay Adam Clayton or Larry Mullen Jr.'s contributions to the band or to this record. Quite the opposite. They do a really good job of supporting what Edge and Bono are doing. Let's move over to With or Without You for a minute, actually, and look at how that groove develops. Surprise, surprise. It's actually very similar to what happened on Streets, though some of the particulars are a little bit different.

Mullen comes in at the top on the drums, and rather than playing all thump and sizzle with minimal pop, he's playing all thump and pop with no sizzle. Just boom, boom, bop, boom, boom, like a heartbeat.

And then as the song shifts into that new melody, and you give yourself away, Mullen shifts his groove and begins adding hi-hat and tom embellishments that add a lot of subdivision while bringing up the backbeat by playing rim shots on the snare drum. It's not dissimilar from how they develop the drums on Streets. And you give

The song has expanded at this point. This almost feels like a new section, like a pre-chorus or something, despite the fact that the chord progression hasn't changed and really the song is just chugging along. Part of it is Bono's new melody. That's a very distinct melody and distinct lyrics and you give yourself away. And just as big of a part of it is the Edge's guitar part.

another of his most iconic guitar melodies, this neat little figure that alternates between a D sus and a D major up top and two dramatic open strings, a D and then a G on the bottom. It's a really cool line when you put the two together and it's very easy to play. ♪

And I mean, this is another reason that I see these two songs as kind of mirror images of one another. The ideas that Edge is playing with are so similar here to the ideas he's playing with on Where the Streets Have No Name. Both are D sus chords resolving to D major. Both are played with such a similar sound on the strat and in such a similar style. Learning these

♪♪

And I just want to take a second to step outside of the analysis and really sit with the fact that after this many years, it can be hard to actually listen to both of these songs and hear them as songs written by people and not just, you know, songs. Like songs that I've heard a thousand times throughout my entire life on the radio as a kid. Songs you'll hear at school dances or corporate events or weddings or funerals.

In that light, it's interesting to hear Bono reflect on this song in that 1999 documentary. By then, U2 was at the height of their powers. They were one of the hugest rock bands in the world, and you can tell he's wrestling a little bit with that. Looking back all these years later, at the time when they wrote what would go on to be some of their biggest songs, back then, they were really just six guys in a house experimenting.

Like our music, looking back on it now in the 80s, I can see that it was so out of step with everything around. It was mad. It was like a kind of ecstatic music. Kind of gauche and uncool, but just with a kind of highness to it. This kind of highness that I think works so well live. Now, of course, when you're selling that...

many records and you hear me say it was out of step with the time you kind of want to go you want to slap me around the face but it was going into it and something which is a staple on the radio now like with or without you could understand it's a very odd sounding song it just sounds normal because you've heard it so many times that they were it was an unusual sounding record

On his way from zero to that liftoff that you just heard, Bono uses so many different vocal techniques, and he rings so many different modes and feelings out of his voice. I've always loved Bono's voice. I can't help it. I just think he's got an incredible instrument. It has this endless reserve of raw, expressive power.

power, and he's so willing to take it all the way from a whispered falsetto to his screaming high register. Even his breath is expressive. And With or Without You is a real vocal showcase for Bono. As much as he seems like more of an instinctive musician than a methodical one, he's really put a lot of thought into how he's going to sing this song.

For example, okay, take the first time he sings the title of the song, the words with or without you. With or without you. With or without you. It's as small as can be in that bottom note, that D almost fades away to nothing. Now compare that to the second time that he sings the same words. With or without you. Without you. With or without you.

Man, I mean, it's just textbook stuff. He's in this gorgeous in-between place in his voice, combining his mixed chest voice with his head voice as he jumps up to that A for the first time. And then just adding weight in this carefully measured way.

It's beautifully sung, and it's a real contrast with the first way that he sang it, as well as with how he sings it the third time, the final time he sings the title of the song, just before the band cranks up to the song's wordless climax. That last time, Bono is fully in his chest voice, he is belting it out, and there's so much more power to his vocal performance. See, no huge difference between this...

And this. And then on that final line, I can't live with or without you, there's even an overdubbed harmony part. Listen for it.

So now we've reached it for a second time in this episode, the moment in the song when U2 fully lets loose. The drum groove is fully formed with a solid backbeat augmented by a tambourine. The guitar is unleashed layer upon layer of powerful energy. Clayton's driving the bus on his bass, and Bono sings a familiar melody, an A walking down a D major scale. ♪

Sounds familiar, right? I mean, it's undeniable. These songs really are two sides of the same coin.

It isn't every day that a band writes two songs, two hit songs that are so closely related that you can superimpose the verse from one onto the groove from the other. And it kind of works. See the storm set in your eyes. See the thorn twist in your side for you.

I mean, that could work, right? That could be a U2 song. And the same is true of the inverse. Oh,

I find it truly remarkable that U2 kicked off an album with two songs, each with so many ostensible similarities, but that each lands so completely differently and that both songs would go on to become not just hits, but essential pieces of the firmament of popular music for decades.

In the documentary, Edge describes the music on Joshua Tree as "cinematic music." And that term might feel quaint these days, since the word "cinematic" is arguably overused to describe everything from video games to commercials to someone's morning commute, but I think it's actually illuminating how he defines the term in his own words.

We were working with a lot of moods on this record, you know. We'd set up a certain kind of feeling, a certain location with the sound and that would be our jumping off point, would be like an actual kind of place. We used to call it kind of cinematic music. That was kind of our way of describing it. And it just meant music that actually brought you somewhere.

Somewhere physical as opposed to an emotional place, actually a real location.

Both songs go out in the same way, by returning to the beginning for a lengthy reprisal of their intro just in reverse. And for all their similarities, both songs conjure different spaces, different places, and the many elements that connect them make a logical sort of sense. After all, each song is a manifestation of where these six creative people were at when they were writing together. This moment in time resulted in music that

that fits together organically.

Brian Eno perfectly articulated that certain magic that happens when a group of human beings turn a house into a creative supercollider, bouncing their ideas off of one another and seeing what might result. It turned out not to be the same experiment for any one of the six of us. But that's actually, that's where the great collision comes from, the creative collision of everybody pushing as hard as they can in a slightly different direction creates this

stretched envelope you know this slightly defocused and quite rich and densely interconnected thing called a record

And that'll do it for my episode on U2 and their one three punch of Where the Streets Have No Name and With or Without You. I had a lot of fun making this episode, though it proved to be a distinct challenge. I've never quite tried making an episode like this, threading two songs together in the way that I did, though I was happy with where it ended up.

Next episode is a really cool one focusing on a single song by a singular songwriter. And if you'd like to hear it right now, you can go become a member of the Strong Songs Patreon at patreon.com slash strong songs and you will get every episode two weeks in advance. You can also just send a one-time donation to the link in the show notes. Every little bit makes it possible for me to keep making this show. It really is a labor of love and I'm so happy that I'm able to put in all the time that it takes to make it.

Thanks so much to everyone who supports my work and this show. I am also excited to announce that at long last, there is new merch in the Strong Song store. We worked with the amazing Alexandra Tinsley to come up with a really cool new illustration for a couple of new products, which honestly, I don't want to spoil it. Just go check out the store and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.

We've also added a couple of new product categories, including hoodies, after many requests, so I know that that will make some of you out there very happy. I actually have my own StrongSongs hoodie en route to me right now, and I will try to wear it as I'm recording future episodes. Last thing, we did have to raise prices in the store somewhat, since as it turns out, we were actually losing money on the store, and that's not really how it's supposed to work. So it is once again a fun way to get a nice piece of merch while supporting the show. ♪

Okay, Strong Songs is recorded at the Caldera in Portland, Oregon, with production support from Emily Williams and show art by Tom DJ. For a list of all the tools and software I used to make this show, check out the link in the show notes, where you'll also find social links, my newsletter, and a bunch of other good stuff. That'll do it for now. I'll see you all in two weeks with a new episode. Until then, take care and keep listening. ♪