The Unforgettable Fire - U2

The Unforgettable Fire – U2

"You hunger for a time, a time to heal, desire time,
And your earth moves beneath your own dream landscape,
Oh, on borderlands we run." (A Sort of Homecoming)

In 1984, U2 made a significant shift in their music away from the externally engaged and highly social music of their first three albums, to a musical vision that combined a more sweeping panoramic view of the natural world with an introspective emotional focus. The thematic arc of the Boy/October/War set of albums served not only to establish the band’s style and critical mass, but also defined a stage in their artistic development and the early stages of “alternative music” at large. The excesses of 80s popular music were abandoned for a new union of punk rebellion and youthful idealism, all combined under a musical style that embraced potently distilled, almost hermetically sealed, individualized sound. In its first fledgling steps, U2 succeeded in harnessing the unique guitar approach of The Edge, and Bono’s passionate vocal idealism to create songs that embodied the youthful struggle between a childlike innocence and harsh external world. But with the release of The Unforgettable Fire, there was a departure from this first chapter of their work to a new thematic approach, as well as new direction musically and technically in their approach to songwriting, instrumentation and recording.

The change in their music is evident from the opening of the first track The preceding albums opened with a manifesto, both sonically and thematically: Boy – “I Will Follow”; October – “Gloria”; War “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. Where those tracks summon the listener to attention with their distinctive ringing guitar riffs, “A Sort of Homecoming” slowly swells into its sound with a subtle tom-tom rhythm and a guitar that sighs into the mix like a slow swelling wind. Similarly the vocal opening of the album differs from the impassioned overtures of the previous songs that directly tackle the individual’s struggle in an overtly social world, “A Sort of Homecoming” begins the song speaking of a withdrawal to introspection and the natural world:

"And you know it’s time to go, through the sleet and driving snow
Across the fields of mourning to a light that’s in the distance… "

This is a very different U2 than the album that opens with “I can’t believe the news today…”. And it is a very different music, which we hear evolving over the course of the next nine tracks.

The only song that has a direct relationship to the socially engaged, up tempo, martial beat compositions of their past is the second track “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. But this song also represents an important departure in terms of the social anthem. Where previously U2, and other socially engaged alternative music, used the anthem as an expression of outrage focused on specific events (Sunday Bloody Sunday, etc.), “Pride” uses specific historical figures and the events of their lives (Ghandi, Jesus, and most prominently Martin Luther King Jr.) not as a rally point for protest, but as a symbol for personal inspiration. However as impactful and relevant as these individuals are to current social issues, the song never uses them to champion specific social issues, but instead turns the listener inward and uses these exemplars as a meditation on the personal value of love as the motivator behind these great men. As an anthem, “Pride” went on to become a flag waving “arena moment” for social activism, but at its core the song is something very different.

Thematically, the album continues in this vein. Where the songs confront the external world, they turn to introspection. Where they engage the city, they retreat to the natural world. Combined with the opening track, “Wire”, “Indian Summer Sky” and “The Unforgettable Fire” form the centerpiece of the albums conceptual arc. When the lyric confronts the real world of relationships and hardship, it turns immediately to introspective evaluation of the personal spiritual values; and any reference of the physical world is quick to juxtapose the man made world of cities to the natural world of rivers, mountains, wind and sky. It is as if, through the preceding three albums the songs exhausted themselves in the endless wrestling of trying to find a place for the individual in the world, and now stretched to more universal themes trying to make sense of personal feelings in the sprawling sweep of life; not just for the individual, but for everyone. As the songs make this leap from the personal to the universal, Bono again and again returns to natural metaphors. Throughout the album he sings of the wind, the sky and the sea as metaphors for the soul and the heart hovering above and surrounding the heavy landscape of social interaction. In his voice and in his words we can hear his longing to abandon himself to these sweeping natural forces, and find resonance for the passion that drives him (and all of us) in the un-ending driving forces of nature.

The new lyrical direction of the album would fall flat however, were it not for the introduction of new producer and engineer in the recording of the album. Sharing credit for both tasks, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois came aboard for the recording to support and promote the growth of the sweeping sonic aspirations that always lurked beneath the surface of U2’s sound. The sound that developed proved to be essential to realize the goal of the album. Renowned for their talents in ambient and atmospheric music Eno and Lanois, cultivated and encouraged The Edge’s already prominent use of echo, delay and reverb effects to new heights. Where U2’s major songs previously relied on distinct guitar driven riffs, the major tracks on The Unforgettable Fire begin with the guitar creating vast sweeping swells of sound more as atmosphere, than as riff. And in songs where the guitar is featured as the dominant element (“Pride”, “Wire”, “Bad,” “Indian Summer Sky”) it provides as much texture and atmosphere through its rhythmic delay effects and simple arpeggiated chords, as it does melody or “hook”. With the guitar lifted into the upper most portions of the mix, this allowed the bass and drum space to combine even more tightly than previously heard in U2’s music, both driving the songs forward with intensity and providing the brooding melodic foundations for the Bono’s vocal that soars with a passion in these songs that was never reached in their previous recordings. Ultimately the sonic approach captured in this album creates the perfect correlate to the imagery of the lyrics, The Edge’s guitar becomes the wind, the rain and the shimmering sky, while the bass and drums become the rolling hills, mountains and rivers of the landscape the songs move through.

But no discussion of this landmark album could be complete without tackling the epic centerpiece of the album - “Bad”. On the surface, the song is an elegy to drug addiction and the havoc it brings to relationships; but this song is much more. The slow restrained opening with its simple rhythm guitar creates a gentle, almost quiet, space in which the lyric reaches out to bridge the implied sorrow of alienation. As the song progresses it slowly layers in more instrumentation, from the subtle but tightly wound drums, to the lilting melodic base line, and to even further layers of echoing guitar. Throughout the building storm of sound the vocal moves from its gesture of reconciliation, through recognition of its helplessness in facing the alienation and dislocation between people. The lyric here functions both literally as a description of the helplessness of a friend to reach through the power of drug addiction, but also can be interpreted more abstractly as the confrontation of unbridgeable gap between souls in any relationship (again the theme of the album returns here in the transformation of the specific to the universal). But what’s remarkable in this composition is that while the confusion, complexity and alienation builds and swirls around this meditation on relationships, and as Bono’s voice is driven to higher and higher soaring notes that seem to push the limit of his range, there remains the positive underpinning of hope; the belief that escaping the cycles of alienation and separation between people is actually possible. The lyric pushes on through the swelling tide of sound “to let it go, and so to find away” through the confusion. Even at the song’s apex of confusion where Bono only sings a litany of relationship demons, “this desperation, dislocation, separation, condemnation, revelation, in temptation, isolation, desolation”, the chorus of the song makes its triumphant return “let it go”.

It’s this spirit of release that pervades not only the song, but the album overall – the drive to move past the demons that haunt our day to day lives, and “let it go”. Towards this end, the final lyrics of "Bad" seem to suggest the enlightenment philosophy behind the song – “I’m wide awake, I’m not sleeping”. In many ways The Unforgettable Fire is an album of transition and transformation – it is music of awakening, or enlightenment. As it releases the music from wrestling with the reality tackled by their previous albums, it turns to universal themes in a more spiritual journey. it proposes a new enlightened state, a new landscape across which the music will travel. Leading the listener along new paths of self-discovery, and new bridges to cross what divides us from each other.