Random Thoughts on U2’s “Songs of Experience”

Now that I’ve had a chance to listen to U2’s new album, Songs of Experience, a few times I’ve started to formulate a few thoughts about it. I’m not going to edit this much, just going to blurt out some thoughts and ideas. It’s my blog, I can publish something unpublishable if I want to! 🙂 I am also FULLY aware that I am committing the sin of reading altogether too much autobiography into some of these songs. Read it like this: when I say “Bono” or “Bono’s wife” or whatever, I really mean “the projected character that is the persona depicted in these songs and may or may not precisely map to the life and loves of the actual human being who wrote the words.” There. Also, pretty much every U2 album can be interpreted through political, religious, or personal lenses. I tend towards the personal because I don’t do religion really and if I look too closely at U2’s politics I start to nitpick. So forgive me if I don’t dive into those aspects of this album.

I’ve seen a lot of hype around this album – initial reviews ranged from “U2 is rejuvenated” to “their best album since Achtung Baby.” I can’t quite jump on board the “best since Achtung Baby” train, as I’m the weirdo who actually likes a fair amount of U2’s 21st-century output, but I will say up front that I think SoE is a very good album overall, if a bit sonically disjointed and all over the place. (So. Many. Producers.)

In interviews, various members of U2 have talked a bit about the backstory of this album, including:

• The album was pretty much finished, and then the political situation in the US (and by extension in the world) went all to hell, and they pulled it back feeling the need to address that in some way. (To me, some of the political stuff feels grafted on. But U2 gonna be U2.)
• Bono apparently had a serious medical crisis around the end of 2016, on top of the still-relatively-recent bicycle accident that messed him up pretty good. He hasn’t shared the details of this event publicly, but has alluded to the fact that it was indeed serious and caused him to do some looking-into-the-void.
• Bono has described this album as a series of letters to the people in his life: his wife, his children, U2 fans, himself, etc. I haven’t quite identified who’s being addressed in each letter/song, but I don’t think it’s always necessary to know.

I haven’t been reading fan forums for the most part, and haven’t read that many of the reviews, so if there are insights here, I’m pretty sure someone else probably had them first. 🙂 So. Some things I’ve noticed, then:

There’s a recurrent mention of “the world” that seems to relate to opposition within a relationship – a conflict of goals or desires between two people, perhaps, one wanting “the world” and the other not interested in that particular flavor of rockstar success and/or political involvement. (We’ve seen this before – “you say you want your story to remain untold” from “All I Want Is You.”)

• “I wanted the world but you knew better” (Love Is All We Have Left)
• “When the world is ours, but the world is not your kind of thing” (You’re The Best Thing About Me)
• “You walked out in the world / like you belong there” (The Little Things That Give You Away)
• “There is a light we can’t always see / And there is a world we can’t always be” (13 [There Is A Light])

I haven’t fully gotten my head around this “world” business, but it seems really key to the album.

I think many, but not all, of the songs on this album have direct analogues on the earlier Songs of Innocence and I think the cinematic, atmospheric opener “Love Is All We Have Left” is the analogue to “Iris,” which is addressed to the mother Bono lost when he was young. “Iris” starts with “The star that gives us light / has been gone a while” and muses, “Something in your eyes / took a thousand years to get here.” And “Love Is All…” includes the line “Now you’re at the other end of the telescope / Seven billion stars in her eyes.” So is this letter-in-song addressed to Iris? Yes, but I think it’s also addressed to Bono himself, who has said that when his mother died he wanted to throw himself into her grave, go where she’d gone (“if you walk away, walk away, I will follow”) and who, as mentioned earlier, had that recent medical crisis: “Hey, this is no time not to be alive… Don’t close your eyes.”

Speaking of analogue songs, “American Soul” is a pretty direct rewrite of SoI‘s “Volcano” (itself a recycling of “Glastonbury,” which was performed live a few times but never released) – both musically and lyrically. It’s an interesting choice, with the earlier song an exploration of volcanic anger and the newer song a celebration of the defiant American dream. (And can I just say, every time that song gets to the “RefuJesus” part, I think about possible band meetings involving conversation like “look, they’re going to accuse us of being pretentious and too-clever-by-half anyway, we may as well own it” as well as the fact that the fan community is going to include significant factions who roll their eyes in disgust at “RefuJesus” as well as those who are liable to get “RefuJesus” tattooed on their … well, wherever they have space left for it.)

Another SoI/SoE analogue: “Red Flag Day” feels to me (lyrically, if not so much musically, though maybe some music nerd can tell me whether the chord structures bear any relation to one another – I can almost hear a weird mashup of the two in my head, so maybe?) like the resolution of the romantic standoff posed in “Every Breaking Wave.” Both songs use ocean metaphors to describe the fear of taking risks. Where “Every Breaking Wave” has the protagonist chasing the waves but never getting in the water for fear of being “helpless against the tide,” in “Red Flag Day” he invites his beloved with “I, I will meet you where the waves are breaking” and closes with the entreaty “Baby, let’s get in the water.”

The final, and maybe most obvious, analogue song is “13 (There Is A Light)” which is a revision and extension of SoI‘s “Song for Someone.” It’s really lovely, taking the lover’s sentiment from the earlier song and extending it to an idea of love, or compassion, or hope for oneself and for the world. To suggest that this song, in the way it expands upon the simple love song it’s built on, literally poses love as salvation is probably not going too far, given that it’s U2.

Sonically, I think “Lights of Home” is my favorite, with its excellent blues-stompin’ guitar sounds. This one bluntly addresses the medical scare: “I shouldn’t be here ’cause I should be dead” as well as “I thought my head was harder than ground” which evokes the bicycle accident for sure. I think this song might be Bono’s letter to God – though of course U2 has always been that band where you never really know if a song is about God, or a woman, or music/the band – near the beginning, he directly questions his relationship to his faith: “Oh Jesus if I’m still your friend / What the hell / What the hell you got for me?” In this song, “the lights of home” seem to be both the first light you see when you’re born (“I can see the lights in front of me / One more push and I’ll be born again”) and the light you supposedly go into as you die. Death as rebirth, and wrestling with whether he’s supposed to – forgive me – go towards the light right now. The “Free yourself to be yourself” ending seems a little tacked-on to me, though I do think it fits here a little better than it did at the end of “Iris” where Bono tried to get it to stick before.

My other favorite is “Summer of Love.” Edge’s guitar here is simple, elegant, and evocative; the vocals, with Lady Gaga doing some background work, are unforced and airy. Images like “The winter doesn’t want you / it haunts you” (Bono’s crisis happened in the winter, remember) and “We’ve one more chance / before the light goes” touch on what it’s like to face mortality. And “I’ve been thinking about the west coast / Not the one that everyone knows” at first seems to evoke the idea of death happening in the west, where the sun sets – but then the mention of “the rubble of Aleppo,” which is near the west coast of Syria, gives the song a whole double meaning. To me, the song seems to talk about how facing one’s own mortality gives one compassion for those facing mortality elsewhere, even as far away as Syria. Since U2 has talked about the refugee crisis (particularly in Syria) a lot over the past few years, it seems natural for them to set this song there. This album does overall have an interesting balance (maybe at times a little forced) of the super-personal and the global-political. I think someone other than me is going to have to untangle those particular threads, though. U2 is always so metaphorical and indirect, plus there’s all the Biblical references that I always miss, so sometimes I kind of give up on interpreting and just sing along. Anyway, this is a gorgeous song. I’d listen to it over and over just for that guitar line.

I do love the vocal on “The Showman (Little More Better)” – you can almost hear Bono trying not to laugh, bouncing and grinning around the room, reveling in his own position as the entertainer who “prays his heartache will chart.” I love the gleefulness in his voice here, and the idea that although the showman is basically a liar and a fraud, he’s redeemed by the audience: “I lie for a living / I love to let on / But you make it true when you sing along.” It’s a sly, though not altogether uncomplicated, little love letter to U2’s audience.

I also love, though I’m not completely sure why, “The Little Things That Give You Away.” The lyrics are at once terribly vague and highly evocative, and it seems to be about a crisis of some sort (life or death, et cetera) and a conflict, perhaps internal, that isn’t resolving – until the end of the song: “Sometimes / the end isn’t coming / it’s not coming / the end is here / sometimes.” Is this about how, when death seems imminent, you know there’s just not time to resolve all the conflicts and you just have to accept them as you accept the oncoming end? I’m not sure. I’m still untangling this one, but it makes me want to keep thinking about it, so I guess that’s success for a song. Interestingly, when this song was performed early in the 2017 Joshua Tree tour, Bono introduced it as the last song on the new album – but it ended up being about 2/3 of the way into the album, nowhere near the last. Maybe because closing a show with it made it clear that it wasn’t emotionally resolved as we’re conditioned to want an album-closer to be? Maybe because the end wasn’t the end after all? Dunno.

“Landlady” is such a lovely, straightforward love letter from Bono to his wife. If you like love songs, you’ll love this one. I would love it more, I think, if I weren’t so fascinated by the inherent power dynamic in the concept of one’s wife being one’s landlady. Power dynamic? The more I think about it the more I’m not sure that’s quite right; before I bought a house I always felt like my landlords had the upper hand, because they could change the rules and decide that next year tenants weren’t allowed to have more than two cats and those of us with three would just have to find somewhere else to live, or they could arbitrarily raise the rent, or whatever. But I can also see how a touring musician would have an … interesting … relationship with the concept of home. Whose home is it really if one of you is gone for months at a stretch? I bet sometimes it feels to him like “she lives here and I just borrow the space sometimes.” Anyway. I get hung up on that silly stuff when I should focus on what a lovely song this is. Next listen I’ll try to remember that!

I have mixed feelings about “The Blackout.” The line “is this an extinction event?” pops into my head every time I read the news lately, though. Did Bono really stick “Jack” and “Zac” at the end of those two lines so he wouldn’t get caught rhyming “back” with “back”? Lazy. But the band sounds great here and it is going to be a fun song to hear live.

“Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way” – Bono’s letter to his younger self. Experience looking back at innocence with compassion. This one feels timeless. Has the potential to be a real show-stopper live, if Bono is in good voice.

“13 (There Is A Light)” feels, musically, like a bookend to the opening song (for we dinosaurs who still listen to albums straight through), and perhaps a bit of an answer to the questions posed in “Love Is All We Have Left.” I imagine this song closing the main portion of the live show, perhaps with a re-lighting of the giant lightbulb that hung over the stage – and was shattered when innocence was shattered – on the 2015 tour. That would be a nice full-circle moment, because I think with this song, innocence kind of gets reclaimed from the ravages of experience: “I’ve got a question for the child in you / before it leaves.” (And then of course the band would come back and do a few of the big hits in the encore, similar to the format of the last couple of tours.)

The production on many of the songs goes in a slick, contemporary-pop direction. There’s even some Auto-Tune, for crying out loud, something most producers wouldn’t even dream of plastering on top of one of rock’s best vocalists. I’ve seen a couple of reviews that suggest the sound leans a little too far towards Coldplay (trying to sound like the band who grew up trying to sound like you? really, U2?) and there are moments where I can’t disagree. At times the production tries so hard to sound super-contemporary (trying, I suppose, to position U2 as “relevant! not just old people music! honest!”) and this will inevitably leave the album sounding super-dated in a few years. They do know how to create a catchy hook, though. That definitely hasn’t changed.

Anyway, those are some disjointed thoughts and things I noticed about the album. I am looking forward to hearing some of these songs live, and wishing I could manage more than one show – but between the giant kerfuffle of the ticket sales for this tour, and the hike in prices over the last couple tours, I’m afraid one might be my limit. I’m going to St. Louis, and should serendipity strike with an opportunity for the right ticket, I’m not ruling out one of the Chicago shows (inconveniently mid-week as they are).

 

 

In the wake of Bataclan: For my people

I’ve written before about why live music is so important to me. While terrorism anywhere in the world appalls me, the recent attack at the Parisian music club Bataclan strikes close to home. It’s like what a religious person might feel if terrorists opened fire on a church. Perhaps even something like what a parent feels if it happens in a school. Music venues are my holy ground, my home away from home. Yes, bad things have happened at concerts before – going back to Altamont, and farther – and in the world today it does occur to one to be aware of one’s surroundings when in a crowd of people, and annoying as it is to be wanded or have your bag searched going into an arena, you realize that we live in a time when there have to be precautions.

But even so, even so. You just don’t expect this. And I feel like music people are my people – like music fans are fellow citizens of a (large and very diverse, but still real and precious) sort of country of the heart. The people who died and were injured at Bataclan, those were my people. Bono talked about this in an interview he gave hours after the attacks; U2 was in fact scheduled to perform in Paris – at a much, much larger venue of course – the next night and the night after, and of course those concerts have been cancelled. I would have spent this afternoon listening to someone’s stream of the show on Mixlr, most likely, and in fact I’d just downloaded the HBO Now app so I could watch the near-live broadcast of the show tonight. I was looking forward to that. My disappointment in not getting to hear and see the show is a tiny, tiny thing compared to the pain and suffering experienced by those who came under attack and by their loved ones. But it brings it that much closer to home for me. Those were my people.

So, to the musicians – and also the crew, staff, merch managers, promoters, bus drivers, instrument techs, sound and lighting folks, even the spouses and families who share their loved ones with us when they go out on tour – thank you. We follow you because what you do helps us navigate a world in which awful things happen, and it helps us celebrate a world in which beauty exists and needs to be noticed every day of our lives. We know touring is often hard, and after Bataclan it may be even harder in some ways. What you do matters deeply. Please know that.

To the music fans – let’s don’t let this stop us from getting out there and going to the show. Yes, look around you as you go into any venue and be aware of where the exits are. Maybe stay sober enough to make rational decisions should an emergency arise. But then let go of the awful world and dance, dance, dance in the beautiful world. Let’s don’t let anything keep us from that.

image by jean jullien

 

If the Sky Can Crack: On losing your chops

So, I wrote about why listening to live music is so important to me. But, asks the astute reader, what about playing music yourself? You have a guitar, right? Doesn’t that give you some of the same stuff?

It does, when it goes well. But of course my own history with playing music is a little more complicated than a simple yes or no answer. Of course it is.

I first started playing guitar in high school, back when I was first discovering my own taste in music and finding that everything from Jackson Browne to Patti Smith, from Segovia to Springsteen, all kinds of music floated my boat. In fact, it was at a classical guitar recital my parents took me to (it might have been Christopher Parkening, although to this day I don’t remember for sure) that I decided I wanted to play guitar. I remember vividly that there was a piece which involved a lot of harmonics, these gorgeous pure chiming notes, and all I wanted to do in the world was to make a sound like that.

Eventually my parents got me a little Yamaha classical guitar (which, yes, I still have and treasure) and set me up with lessons. Before long I’m angling my way through Bach etudes, arpeggios, the occasional soft-rock song. I’m hardly ever more content than when I’m playing. This is around 1976, 1977.

True story.

Fast forward a year or two. I’m checking out folk and rock songbooks from the public library, figuring out chords to songs I like. (I’m also using the library to read Billboard and Variety and Rolling Stone, when other kids my age are reading Tiger Beat. I am nothing if not Serious About Myself.) I’m using my savings to buy a steel-string guitar because the little classical just doesn’t really sound like rock & roll. (It’s an Ovation Balladeer, the round-back guitar like what Nancy Wilson of Heart played on stage at the time – I still have it, with its bright brassy tone and its propensity for volume.) I’m hanging out with my friend Sally, who also had a guitar; we both want to be Jimi Hendrix and we daydream about white Stratocasters.

A bit later, I bought an electric guitar: not a Strat, but a red Gibson Melody Maker. I kept that for about a year, never quite figuring out how to make it sound like anything, then sold it when I was getting ready to go to college and needed the money. If only I could go back in time and not do that… that was a sweet little guitar. But the electric guitar is a very different animal from the classical. It was a language I could hear and understand, but couldn’t speak it myself yet.

Anyway, college meant the end of classical guitar lessons, though I did manage a semester of beginning piano which taught me a lot about music theory. I kept playing, though I wasn’t practicing as seriously as I had in high school (arpeggios and finger exercises and so forth); I enjoyed strumming Fleetwood Mac and Heart songs in the courtyard of my dorm, singing with friends. After college, I even performed onstage a few times; I belonged to a writers’ group that gave readings a couple times a year locally, and every now and then along with my poems I put an original song into our “setlist.”

That? That was terrifying. Not the part where I was performing something I’d created myself – reading poems onstage never bothered me much. But singing in public felt more vulnerable and scary than pretty much anything I’d ever done. And I didn’t do it much before I stopped.

I’ve often said that if I could have one superpower, I would choose singing. Not playing guitar, funny enough; that has always seemed like something I could get good at if I just worked my ass off for years. I could understand how to get from here to there, whether or not I actually put in the practice time to do it. Singing? That was something other people were somehow good at.

The funny thing is: I have always LOVED singing. When nobody’s listening – in an empty house, in the shower, driving on the highway – I sing. I add harmonies to my favorite albums. At concerts, when they’re the singing-along kind of concerts like Springsteen or the Indigo Girls, I’m right there because nobody (I imagine) can hear me in the crowd.

But not where people can hear me. Which sort of always did put a crimp in my youthful fantasies of being a rock star. That, and the fact that I was too socially awkward to start a band so that I could just be the guitarist and let somebody else sing.

Anyway. Adulthood being what it is, what with full-time jobs and bills to pay and everything, I stopped playing guitar very much. I’ve had brief flings with resuming it – most notably in 2008 when, after an epic road trip (well, it FELT epic anyway) for three Springsteen shows, I felt thoroughly inspired and went out & bought myself an electric guitar. (“So you wanna be a rock & roll star…“)  It wasn’t the white Strat I’d daydreamed of at seventeen, but it was a Strat, by golly. And it felt good to play it. I still didn’t quite understand its grammar and its syntax, but I wasn’t trying to play it like a classical guitar anymore, so I was able to get as far as making noises that were pleasing to my ear, if not my neighbors’ ears.

But that didn’t last. Because here’s the thing. When you don’t play, you forget how to play. You lose your chops, as musicians say. Your fingers feel fat and uncontrollable. Your hands cramp. You can figure out that you should play a B chord right there, but you can’t get your left hand gracefully from one chord to the next. And if you’re still fluent in listening to music, if you have a pretty good ear, you know exactly how crappy you sound. It is really hard to accept “well, I sound a little better than I did last week” when you know you also sound a whole lot worse than you did twenty years ago. When you can hear your own mistakes so very clearly.

This is how guitars end up getting dusty under the bed.

You’re in my mind all the time – I know that’s not enough…

Fast-forward to two or three years ago. I got an iPad, and I promptly downloaded the GarageBand app. Boy, is that a fun little toy. You don’t have to have any talent or musical skill, really. You can set it so that everything comes out in the right key. You don’t have to tune anything. I started noodling around and found myself composing little snippets. Nothing serious, but maybe the sort of thing you’d hear over the local forecast on the Weather Channel. It was stuff that sounded like music, and I was creating it, and holy moly, it was fun. I popped a few of my tracks up on Soundcloud, just for grins.

But it’s the paint-by-numbers version of making music. It’s fun, and maybe it takes a small amount of skill, but it completely lacks the physical aspect of playing an instrument. There’s more than just being able to choose the right notes at the right time – you also have to coordinate your muscles and your breath. Which is why it takes so much practice and also why it’s so absorbing, so immersive, and ultimately so healing.

All my GarageBand noodling was starting to remind me of how much I used to love sitting in my bedroom, working out chords and fingerings, trying to transpose songs into a key I could come anywhere close to singing. But my body resisted the act of going to the guitar case, taking out the instrument, tuning it up. I knew I would sound like crap. Playing badly makes me feel like I am disrespecting the guitar. (I know that is not logical.)

I’m in my fifties now, and I have a full-time job I like a great deal, which does not involve being a musician. It’s no longer even remotely realistic (as it is for every 17-year-old in the world) to daydream about being in a band, traveling around the world, making people swoon with my music. Anything I do now, musically, is going to be just for me. It feels different now than it did back then … but it still feels necessary.

So how to get from disrespecting a perfectly good guitar to doing something that would at least feel like fun and not an exercise in pure frustration?

I think I can blame Eddie Vedder for the ukulele. Or maybe Amanda Shires, who also plays one occasionally. I had a little string of realizations:

• Buying a new instrument usually motivates me to play, at least for a while.
• Ukuleles are a whole hell of a lot cheaper than guitars. You can get a decent one, not a professional-quality one but something that is a real instrument and not just a jangly toy, for maybe a little over 100 bucks on eBay.
• You can’t take a uke too seriously. You just can’t. And maybe, just maybe, if I picked up something that wasn’t a guitar, that I didn’t have to worry about disrespecting, I wouldn’t have the undercurrent of expectation that I would somehow magically sound like I did thirty years ago when I was seriously practicing and playing every day.

And you know what … it worked. This past June I got a little Lanikai uke on eBay, a pretty thing made of curly koa. I had to look up how it was supposed to be tuned. (Then I ordered a tuner online, which helps tremendously.) I looked up some chord charts, and I started noodling. Pretty soon I was making noises that sounded sort of like music.

And then I figured out a few actual songs. First, “Angel From Montgomery” – a song I have always loved singing. Then U2’s “Every Breaking Wave.” I even recorded that one onto GarageBand and put some reverb and some strings on it. I was up till 4 am a couple of nights figuring out string arrangements. IT WAS SO MUCH FUN! (And weirdly, once everything was pulled together, I could even sort of stand the sound of my own singing voice. Crazy. A little reverb helps, of course.)

And then, just a couple weeks ago, I got out my nearly-forty-year-old Yamaha classical guitar. I tuned it up and I started to play. My fingers hurt like hell after about fifteen minutes, but thanks to the uke-playing I at least had a bit of a start on regaining the calluses on my left fingertips. Then, the other night, I got out my little blue Strat and made some noise. It sounded like crap, I’m quite certain. But it felt so, so good just to strap it on and stand there.

If the sky can crack, there must be some way back…

For the past few days I’ve been working on an acoustic version of U2’s song “Electrical Storm.” It’s a gorgeous song about a couple at an impasse in their relationship, mired in stasis, desperately looking for a way to get back to the love they feel sure must still be there somewhere. It’s not a crazy difficult song to play, really, but it does have some rhythmic quirks and a bunch of barre chords that make my left hand cramp after three or four times through. It is juuuuuust beyond the boundary of what I can currently manage comfortably, and so it’s a perfect song for me to work on.

And the song itself is a good metaphor for the struggle of regaining your chops. You remember how good it feels when you can just sit for hours with the guitar, your fingers in conversation with the strings, fluent. You remember coaxing notes out of it, each note pure and ringing or staccato as the song requires, the notes and measures a language you speak well enough to write poetry in it. You remember not even having to think about where your hands should go, the guitar practically an extension of your body.

And now your hands feel like you’re wearing heavy gloves, the guitar slips out of position at odd moments, the strings muffle when they should ring and blare out sound when they should be quiet. The notes are like tired, angry children who refuse to get in line. You make yourself work through the song just one more time, you practice that tricky chord change over and over and over. You’re glad you live alone because only the saintliest of neighbors would put up with the endless repetition. Your fingertips burn. You soldier through because you remember what it used to feel like, and you want that. You don’t know if you’ll ever have it. But you want it.

coffee’s cold, but it’ll get you through
compromise, that’s nothing new to you

It’s harder, in a lot of ways, than learning the instrument the first time around. You know that musical fluency is water, not stone: unreplenished, it drains away. Every song you learn, or relearn, is a conversation you’re in danger of forgetting – not a jewel tucked away in a box for safekeeping. You realize that you can’t take anything for granted: memory, muscle, breath. You have less of a margin: when you’re fluent, you can go a few days without playing and you’re still good. But when you’re trying to get your chops back, there’s no room for laziness. If I don’t play for a week, I’ll have lost everything I’ve gotten back in the past month. My muscle memory is still shallow – the playing hasn’t sunk in to become a part of me yet.

“Electrical Storm” ends without emotional resolution. The chorus, “Electrical storm, electrical storm…” suggests that the singer wants some external force to come along and crack open the impasse like lightning cracks through the sky – but it’s unclear whether the invocation of the image is wishful thinking, or whether the storm is actually brewing. The coda goes to a couple of chords that haven’t appeared earlier in the song, which suggests some sort of movement out of the lovers’ stasis, but neither the lyrics nor the chords tell you what resolution they might be moving towards. The song ends with the repeated plea, “Baby, don’t cry,” which tells you that both partners feel the pain of whatever’s going on but doesn’t tell you whether the storm (wished for or actual) is breaking them apart or healing them. And yet, by the time you get to the end of the song, you do feel like you have moved through something.

On rainy days we go swimming out
On rainy days, swimming in the sound

It’s kind of like that with getting your chops back. It’s a struggle to regain fluency, to swim comfortably in the sound. Every night you put away your guitar and you don’t know, really, if you’re ever going to get back to where you were – or if getting back to where you were is really, anymore, the goal.

You’re in my mind all the time – I know it’s not enough
If the sky can crack, there must be some way back
To love and only love…
Electrical storm
Electrical storm
Baby, don’t cry… 

“Electrical Storm” lyrics ©U2

Music Is My Strawberry: How concert-going saves me

It’s true: I go to a lot of concerts. I go to shows, small and large, in my own town; I drive up to Indianapolis (50-60 miles or so each way, depending on which side of the city) several times a year; I’ll happily hit the road for a greater distance if the timing is riight and the show is promising. I’ve driven to Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Nashville, even Kansas City (480 miles each way) on multiple occasions. I’ve gotten on planes just to see a Springsteen show. I’ve imposed on family and friends and spent money on hotels when a rational person would have saved it for retirement or a rainy day. Some shows have been better than others, but I don’t regret a single dollar or a single mile. (3,420 of those miles in 2014, according to my calculations. I try not to add up the dollars.)

If you’re not this kind of crazy, you probably wonder: what’s the deal? Some friends accuse me, good-naturedly, of having too much fun. And it is fun, of course it is; I love the highway driving, I love meeting up with far-flung friends in the GA line, I love the music itself and most of the musicians. But this thing goes a whole lot deeper than “fun.”

Buddha told a parable in sutra:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!  (http://deoxy.org/koan/18)

photo: catlovers (flickr)

We are all, every day, being chased by tigers. My own are no more ferocious than anyone else’s; they are middle-aged tigers, fur glistening with typical middle-aged fears. Money, loved ones’ health, my own health, work, love, mortality. Like anyone in her mid-fifties, I’ve noticed that a few of these have reared up lately and bared their fangs at me. A few months ago I experienced a minor eye problem which is not in itself sight-threatening, but it left me with a good-sized floater that sometimes makes me think a speck of a small flying thing is hovering near my face – could be a gnat, could be a tiny angel, in which case I hope I don’t slap it by mistake – and it reminded me of how some of my older friends say they no longer like to drive at night. I’ve noticed that myself; driving at night isn’t really a problem for me, but it takes a little more conscious alertness than it used to. It’s altogether possible that, some years down the road, I won’t be physically able to strap myself into a husk of silver metal and send myself hurtling down the highway at 65mph in search of music.

Those tigers will eventually – at least that one named Mortality – get me. I’ll be ripped to bits. There’s no way out of that.

Music is made of time. It has a great beat and you can dance to it. The right music throbs you to your bones and blood. Once I sat down at a rock show where everyone was standing, just so I could feel the bass line rumbling through more of my actual skin: my seat was literally shaking with it. Music also takes place in time. One moment the lights are up, the audience is talking and laughing and drinking; the next moment darkness falls and the band slips onto the stage and the tiny lights of amps and transmitters glow across the darkness like nighttime tigers, and the stage lights rise and the audience rises and the great roar rises and whatever room I’m in, a tiny club or a big arena, becomes limitless in space – but still firmly grasped, suspended, held by time. Music has a time signature. Time has signed its contract, time owns it, and me.

When I’m at a concert, I am made of time. I am also living completely in the moment. Music immerses me like nothing else. It captures my senses, my muscles, the beating of my heart. It’s really hard for me to hold still when the music is great. At the very least, I nod my head or sway a bit. At a rock show I’m liable to be the one standing, bobbing, dancing like a giddy maniac. I am listening to music with bone and breath and muscle. If it’s good, I am immersed. I have learned that even singing along can be a kind of listening.

Most days, I worry a lot. And I plan a lot. I love planning for a music-related road trip – charting the route, choosing the hotel, making lists of what to take! But as mindfulness experts and Zen masters point out all the time, living in the present is important. When I’m immersed in music, nothing exists but the moment. Sometimes, it takes that level of immersion to help me let go of the everpresent shadows of my personal tigers. It’s like a long hot shower for the soul. I come out clean.

That strawberry is not just the idea of sweetness. The physicality of music is important. It is muscular, embodied. When you panic, what do you do first? You suck in your breath and then you hold it there, tight as you can. But if I am singing, I am breathing. If I am dancing, even if my actual muscles are relatively still because it is a quiet seated show, my heart is beating. Music involves me intellectually (how does the Edge make his guitar do that??), emotionally (cue up any sad song), and unlike many of my other pursuits (hello poetry), physically. It gets me the hell out of my own head better than anything else I know.

And yes, a lot of my concert-going travels, near and far, are done alone. I have nothing against going to concerts with other people – I do that sometimes too. I enjoy sharing great music with people who appreciate it. It’s fun to hang out in line beforehand, lovely to have someone to save my spot if I duck out for a pre-show pit stop, great to swap opinions over a beer or two afterward. But sometimes, in the middle of a show, I’ll be vaguely aware that someone is leaning over to say something to me, only to find that I’m … not really there. I mean, I’m there, in or near my seat. And I’m there, in my body, in the moment of the music. But I’m not paying attention to my companion. I’m so focused on the music itself, immersed in it, unable/unwilling to surface. I’ve never felt lonely in the middle of a show, even if I’m in an arena with 20,000 strangers. Because I am there with the music. It’s like the actual music is my date. That’s so weird when you put it into words like that, but that is how I feel, when it’s good.

Like a good date, a good concert leaves me little love notes. Sometimes for years afterwards. When I think about my first Bruce Springsteen show, back in September of 1978, all I have to do is remember standing atop a couple of folding chairs on the floor, dancing and singing while the band rocked “Twist & Shout,” and my face breaks into a silly grin no matter what. I remember sitting close to the stage when Joshua Bell was performing, noticing how the violin’s tone sounded ever so slightly different depending on whether the face of the instrument was tipped slightly towards or away from me, and it changed how I understood mathematics, how I perceived the measurement of space and time.

I remember waking up in a hotel room in Chicago one morning and finding out that my mother had been diagnosed with cancer. In the pocket of the jeans I’d worn the night before was a guitar pick handed to me by Little Steven at the end of that night’s show. I carried that guitar pick with me, a tiny reminder that joy continues to exist in the world and that it is always waiting for me on an arena floor or in a seat somewhere. (My mother is fine, by the way. But the reminder persists, and persists in being necessary.) I even love the painful little love notes, like the purple toenail I still have two months after two great U2 concerts because I kept stubbing my toe on the tiny step up into the bathroom of my hotel room. Even that reminds me how much I loved those nights, how much I was willing to put up with in order to find what I was looking for.

Not every show is that life-saving, of course. Most of them are good, now and then I hit a dud, a few of them are truly great. I’m always chasing those moments, barreling down highways in search of them, city to city, chasing those flighty little angels.

I don’t just sit there at a show, consuming it. I let it consume me. (If they are angels, let them be ablaze with falling and with glory.) That’s why I like to be close to the stage when I can – I love not just to be immersed but to be an actual part of it. A good concert leaves me tired, maybe even bruised. I don’t just pay my money and passively take something that I’m given. I let the music give to me but I give back to it as well. There’s a definite exchange of energy: love put out there, love returned.

The vine I’m clinging to is fraying, and it’s burning my hands. Those two mice are gnawing busily away. I can smell the tigers’ breath, pungent with blood. But that strawberry: that single, perfect strawberry is so very, very sweet.

photo: WIlliam Warby (flickr)

Love, Technology, and Rock & Roll: Notes on Two Nights of U2 in Chicago

Intro

You will probably be surprised to learn that, at the ripe old age of 54 and having attended rock & roll shows since the mid-1970s, I made it all the way to 2015 without ever seeing a U2 concert. It’s not that I haven’t liked them – I’ve never NOT liked U2. Mostly, for years, they were one of those bands who’d come on the radio and I’d turn it up and think, golly, I do love this song, I should really pick up more of their albums one of these days. (There are a LOT of bands like that, to be honest.) I almost went to the St. Louis show on the 360 Tour, but I had neither a viable car nor anyone to go with at that point, and between overly complicated travel logistics & the whole stadium thing – it was all just so *big* on that tour – I just didn’t do it. (And I’m one of the few people I know who quite likes the “No Line on the Horizon” album.)

Then “Songs of Innocence” came out, and I quite liked that as well. Plus, Mr. Springsteen wasn’t making any kind of noises about touring anytime soon, and I was feeling the need for a big old arena rock show. So when the U2 Innocence+Experience Tour was announced, I was on board for Chicago.

When they first announced the tour the shows were in pairs, and they said nights 1 and 2 would be distinctly different. As it turns out, that ended up not being the case – and then when the stage and big-screen setup was revealed, I realized that my seat for night 1 was right smack facing the edge of the big screen (which I was told was pretty integral to the show) so I wouldn’t be able to see what was on the screen *at all*. And my seat for night 2 was waaaaaaaaay up in the rafters. Terrible seats, both of them, I thought. Plus, three more shows were announced *after* I had bought my tickets for nights 1 and 2, any of which would have been more convenient for travel than the Wednesday/Thursday pair I’d just spent what was for me a lot of money on. So, I was actually feeling a little cranky about the shows, half tempted to scrap it all, try to sell the tickets, and go on with my life.

Good thing I didn’t.

tl;dr

So here’s the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version. “I’m not a rabid U2 fan. I like arena rock shows generally. Should I go see U2 on this tour?” My answer is, YES. For sure. That is, unless you can’t stand the new album (because it really does form the centerpiece of the show – as a new album SHOULD, I think), or unless rock shows with a strong, predetermined narrative bother you. (At some point, though not today, I plan to write more about what I see as an essential tension between the scripted/theatrical and the spontaneous/improvised – something that I think is a pretty interesting tension to explore in the context of rock & roll. After all, improv is theater too.)

The technology is great, the songs are great, the show’s narrative works really well and incorporates both new and old songs for the most part seamlessly. The band seems enthusiastic about performing and the audience is also enthusiastic. It’s an immersive experience, emotionally and musically engaging.

Bono + spotlight: they love each other

Well, if you can’t stand U2 (as several of my friends can’t), you probably shouldn’t go. Bono hasn’t stopped being Bono, you know? Ha! (I actually do like the “little megalomaniac,” as he called himself on stage one night. Would we be best pals if we met in real life and were in a social position to hang out? Doubtful. But I’m not paying my ticket money to have a best pal. I have friends who will hang out with me for nothin’, believe it or not. I’m at a rock show to see a rock star. And Bono’s pretty good at that. But I digress.)

Obviously I can’t compare this show to previous tours. And yes, I envy my friends who saw them in the early years, for sure! But you gotta live in the present, and live music for me is very much about being in the moment, not regretting the past or worrying about the future. And this moment, this tour, this show, is pretty great.

So, on to my more detailed (okay, verbose) thoughts on the shows that I saw.

Arrival

Getting to Chicago is, for some reason, always fraught for me. It’s just a little over 200 miles, not a bad drive at all, but I always end up at my destination frazzled, later than I’d planned, and muttering things under my breath about traffic and not being a city girl and I don’t know why I put myself through this. This trip was no exception. Despite the best efforts of my perfectly good GPS, I took TWO wrong turns in Gary, and of course I managed to roll into town at about 5:30 so I felt like I was rolling into a greatest-hits double-bill show by Chicago and Traffic. I had just enough time to check into my hotel, change clothes, eat a quick snack of cheese and Fig Newtons and a banana, and get over to the arena; the ticketed start time was 7:30 (I knew the show wouldn’t start until eight-ish) and I got to my seat around 7:45 or so. Just enough time to breathe for a minute, and to think about getting an overpriced crappy beer but not to actually do anything about it.

I love, love, love the minutes before a rock show starts. The GA floor was filling up rapidly – I’d thought about trying to pick up a GA ticket, but between getting there so late and the packed-like-sardines appearance of the floor, I was glad I hadn’t; at 5 foot 1, if I’m farther back than three deep or so from the stage, I’m probably not going to see much unless I can get some space between me and the people right in front of me. My seat was, indeed, pretty much smack behind the edge of the big screen, so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to see that. But I was on the aisle, which is always pleasant, because that way even if there’s a big dude in front of me (which there usually is) I can edge out into the aisle and see. And I was in row 5 behind the smaller stage, which – I suddenly realized – was very, very close. I didn’t know whether I’d see much of U2’s faces, since I was behind the stage, but whatever I saw would be from pretty dang close. And my view of the larger stage, at the other end of the arena, was pretty much unobstructed.

It was going to be OK.

A bit about the stage setup, for those who haven’t been to one of these shows and haven’t been following on social media or whatever. So there’s a big, rectangular, fairly traditional-looking stage at one end of the arena. It’s open on all four sides (U2 is doing interesting things with the sound on this tour, so there are no speaker stacks behind or on the sides of the stage, in fact very little equipment to speak of other than the instruments and mics and a few guitar amps). Then there’s a long runway or bridge spanning the length of the arena, and there’s a big screen hanging from the ceiling that’s the length of this bridge; the screen goes up and down during the show and performs various functions – I saw it described as the Swiss army knife of big screens, and for sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a corkscrew in there somewhere.

Then at the other end of the arena is a smaller, round stage with no speakers or equipment on it to start with. The big stage is the “i” stage and the small one is the “e” stage, each stage’s surface painted with its respective letter – fitting the “innocence + experience” theme of the show. The entire floor is general admission standing, with two areas near the “i” stage set aside as the “Red Zone” where people pay exorbitant prices for VIP tickets and the money goes to U2’s global anti-AIDS charity, (RED). Because of the setup, even the people with the worst spots on the floor are less than half the width of the arena away from at least some part of the stage – not that much farther back than the back of the pit at a Springsteen show. And the whole band performs extensively from both stages as well as from the runway and even from inside the big screen, so everybody gets a chance to be close-ish at some point. It’s actually a really good setup.

City of Blinding Lights

Night 1 Notes: Until the End of the World and Then Some

Thanks to social media, I knew that Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power” would play over the PA just before the band came onstage. So when that song started up – and the lights dimmed, and the volume rose, making it an actual part of the show – I stood up and got ready. (That’s such a great song, too. Especially LOUD, with people singing along.) What I hadn’t realized was that Bono enters from the “e” stage. People around me got really excited and then whoa! There’s Bono! RIGHT THERE! Ha! Fun moment.

He starts singing the “oh, ohhh, oh” intro to “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” and acknowledges the crowd, then saunters down the runway and then the band kicks in and holy crap, when you’ve had as many huge hits as U2 it takes a bit of nerve to open with one of your new songs I think, but it works REALLY well as an opener. Is there anything that feels as great as that first big bass drum blast and that first ferocious guitar of a rock show? Some people like fireworks or roller coasters. I’ll take this instead, any day.

I won’t go through the entire setlist song by song, but I’ll hit some of the high points. Mostly, the narrative of the show works really well. A little tribute to the Ramones, who inspired and influenced them to start playing, followed by one of their very early songs (night 1 was “Electric Co.” and night 2 was “Out of Control” – both sounding incredibly fresh and joyful). “Iris,” Bono’s love song to his mother who died when he was young – “She left me, and left me an artist,” he says, talking about how artists create in order to fill the empty places in their own lives and hearts – was heartfelt and quite moving.

“Song for Someone,” another love song (this time thinking back on when he fell in love, still quite young, with the woman who would become his wife) was also lovely although this was where I began to notice that the rumors about Bono being sick were probably true, as his voice did sound a bit ragged around the edges. Didn’t impede my enjoyment of the show, honestly, but I’m not a vocal purist either. Vocals can be a bit off and still be OK for me. But guitars, man – you gotta tune those!

The heart of the show is about the intersection of personal and political pain, loss, and rage – and how coming of age is about love and loss (the innocence/experience thing). The segue from “Sunday Bloody Sunday” to “Raised By Wolves” to “Until the End of the World” is wholly scripted, with technology and choreography and everything planned down to the second, but it’s completely *present* and some of the most intense moments I’ve witnessed in a rock show. The three songs flow from one to the next; as SBS ends Bono’s singing “I can’t believe the news today” over and over, there’s an audio montage that sounds like going from one radio station to another with snippets of news about a car bomb and other radio snippets from the same moment, and Larry’s standing in the middle of the bridge with a single drum, alone and perfectly still, ringing out single ominous drumbeats.

And then BOOM – the big screen flashes white and there’s an explosion sound that shakes you to your core and ricochets around the arena like a Star Wars explosion in a surround-sound theater. I’ve not heard anything quite like it on this big a scale – it’s just a moment, but it’s quite a feat of audio, really. Made the hairs on my arms stand up. And then “Raised By Wolves” which isn’t my favorite on the album but in this show it is ferocious and sinister and chilling. It ends with Bono on his knees muttering parts of the 23rd Psalm, then muttering “comfort me” and finally screaming, “COMFORT ME” – it’s so intense I get goosebumps just thinking back on it. And then “Until the End of the World” which is whirling and apocalyptic and … just everything, everything. I’m not sure I have ever felt so *immersed* in a rock show before, not even Springsteen at his most emotionally riveting.

There’s a tiny intermission at that point, which I’d heard about and thought it was weird but you know what, after that three-pack I kind of needed to sit down and breathe for a minute! There’s a video on the big screen, animated, Johnny Cash singing “The Wanderer.” It only lasts about four or five minutes, during which time crew members scurry around the smaller stage setting up a drum kit and other equipment. Then the next couple of songs have the band playing actually *inside* the big screen, with animation enhancing them – turns out the screen is actually a cage of sorts, with the lights and animation and whatnot being projected on a closely woven mesh and not a solid “screen” really at all. It’s quite ingenious actually. You kinda have to see it. Then they troop out of the screen, still playing, and all four take up residence on the smaller stage for a few songs.

I’m a big fan of the Edge, and I gotta say, it was incredibly fun to be that close to him to witness firsthand his “Mysterious Ways” dancing/playing. And “Elevation”! That was one of my favorite songs from either night – again, the recorded version is not necessarily one of my favorite U2 songs, but the energy was just off the charts with the audience singing and dancing along. It wasn’t exactly like being in a small sweaty rock club with the band, but it was about as close as you can get in a 20,000 person arena. So, so fun.

The rest of the show was loaded with the big hits, played well, with cool lighting and screen effects. “Pride” sounded amazing, as did “Beautiful Day” and “City of Blinding Lights.” And “Where the Streets Have No Name” basically never fails, does it? So great. I left the arena afterwards feeling washed clean, feeling bigger and bolder and ready to take on the world. If a rock show does that, it is without question a success in my book.

not quite like a sweaty rock club, but I’ll take it

Intermezzo: Doing the Ticket Shuffle

Thursday I enjoyed some downtime walking around the Lincoln Park neighborhood near my hotel. (Did you know there’s a diner in Lincoln Park called “The Edge”? Yup. Right around the corner from my hotel, open 24 hours, and it’s nothing super special but you can get breakfast all day, and at lunchtime on Thursday it was quiet enough that I didn’t feel bad about taking up a table for a couple of hours so I could have a leisurely meal and write in my journal for a while.)

I thought about how close I’d been to the “e” stage the night before, and I thought about my ticket for that night, waaaaaaay up in the rafters. I’ve had this feeling before: after being so close to the band, how can I bear to be so far away? Yes, I’d like to see the big screen, but… ugh. I decided that there were probably some seats in the sections to the left and right of mine that would still be close to the “e” stage but would be at an angle where you could generally see the screen. Oddly, those weren’t tier-1 pricing seats, like my behind-stage seat they were tier-2; for months I’d been looking at available seats and just could never bring myself to buy the most expensive (non-Red Zone) tickets, which were nearly $300. Just couldn’t do that, nor could I bring myself to pay a scalper much above face value. But if one of these would pop up…

I kept poking at Ticketmaster and StubHub all day, just in case. And around 3 pm, lo and behold, there appears a single ticket in the section just to the left of where I’d been. In the third row. I knew there was very little chance I could sell my single seat in the rafters that late in the game, and I decided to splurge anyway. Section 107, row 3, here I come. When I do something crazy like this – like the very expensive last-minute ticket I picked up for Paul McCartney a while back – I can tell if I’ve done the right thing because I kind of start dancing. At least in my head. And that was happening. So.

Got to the arena with a little more time to spare than the first night and found my seat, which was in the middle of the row, next to a rather large man who was eating something quite … er … aromatic. He asked me, a bit crankily, if I was going to be screaming the whole time. “Probably,” I said. Then my neighbor on the other side sat down – a middle-aged woman, with her husband in the aisle seat on her other side – and proceeded to start coughing like she had bronchitis, and asking her husband if he knew whether there was going to be an opening act. I guessed that they might not take too kindly to my “screaming the whole time” either. And directly in front of me, a fairly tall man. Greeeeeat. I was starting to think I was going to regret my last-minute ticket purchase and maybe I should just leave and go up to my original seat in the rafters.

Next to the tall man in front of me was a young mother, in the second-row aisle seat, with her daughter who was probably around six or seven. Super cute kid. And, well. As the lights went down and “People Have the Power” started to play, the young mother realized that the front-row seats in front of her were vacant, and she & her daughter upgraded themselves. I gave it about a half-second’s thought before I slipped down into the second-row aisle seat she’d been in. Tapped her on the shoulder and promised to give her her seat back if she got kicked out of the front row by the rightful ticket holders. And we shared a moment of joy at our suddenly-improved seating luck. I could indeed see the screen, and I was still really close to the “e” stage, and I was behind short people and could see both stages perfectly, and all of a sudden I was very much in my happy place. Yeah!

Night 2 Notes: You Look So Beautiful Tonight

A very similar setlist to night 1 in most respects – the first set featured “Out of Control” in the “Electric Co.” slot, and the second set had a little more variation. Emotionally and musically, still basically the same show. Bono’s voice was decidedly rougher Thursday night – I’ve since heard that the poor guy had bronchitis, which isn’t fun for anyone, much less a singer! By the last song, “One,” he’d pretty much given up singing; he took maybe half a verse and the audience was happy to help out by collectively taking on the rest.

Despite an ailing frontman, I thought the show still had great energy and resonance. The three-pack that closes the first set seemed to have a little less intensity and impact than on night 1, but it’s hard to say, since night 1 also had the “first time I’ve witnessed this” sheen for me. It was really really lovely to get “Bad” towards the end of the second set; despite a rough vocal, it’s one of my absolute favorite U2 songs and I was excited about it.

The middle bit of this show was the highlight for me, most definitely. I was, as I mentioned, in the aisle seat in the second row of one of the sections to the rear of the “e” stage. I was wearing an Amnesty International t-shirt, and that’s one of the band’s pet causes, so I was hoping I might get a nod of approval from someone at some point. (It says “Fighting Bad Guys Since 1961” – which, since I was born in 1961, is so perfect.) I was also directly behind an attractive young woman and her adorable small daughter, as you’ll recall. For at least one of those reasons, and perhaps a combination of all of them (with the added special sauce of me dancing and singing like a giddy maniac), the Edge spotted our little section during “Mysterious Ways” and grinned at us. So that was fun. Then during “Angel of Harlem” he zeroed in on us, stood right in front of us and played directly to us, smiling, for what felt like ages. (I timed it on someone’s YouTube video. It was actually about a minute. Time does funny things sometimes.) “Angel” was never one of my favorite U2 songs, but it’s now taken up residence in my head as this fantastic memory.

For me, there are few nicer moments during a rock show than feeling absolutely joyfully immersed in the music, making eye contact with one of the musicians, knowing that they see how much you’re loving what they are doing, feeling like they’re happy to be there too. In the best of those moments, this exchange of energy happens and it’s a pure and beautiful thing. I can only guess at how it feels for the performer; different, I’m sure, but I bet they love those moments too.

I really loved watching Edge both nights. As a (semi-lapsed, I guess) guitarist, I was fascinated by watching his technique. There were times when he was playing really fast but his hands were so, so quiet – just pure economy of motion that allowed him to play both super fast and super clean. He seems totally centered as he plays, and moves around the stage so gracefully. (Which is why it’s pretty funny that he managed to fall off the stage during one of the early shows on the tour. He wasn’t hurt, but I don’t think Bono is ever going to let him live it down. “Some people have fallen off of this stage, you know,” he said on one of the nights. “But when the Edge falls off stage, it’s like throwing a cat off a wall – he always lands on his feet.”)

Later on during the show, he comes back to the “e” stage for part of “City of Blinding Lights” – the “oh you look so beautiful tonight” part. He’s standing there in the middle of the stage, singing his harmony on that line, and the audience is circled around him, singing it back to him, pointing at him. That was a really shiny, fun moment too. And eye contact, AGAIN. Oh hello there, Mr. The Edge. I feel like we’re almost getting to be friends now. Hee!

Oh, you look…

Oh, the screen! I could see the screen, which I hadn’t been able to the night before. And it is an amazing amazing piece of work. There are times when the band is performing inside the screen and the images on the screen part to reveal them. There’s a moment when the Edge is playing inside the screen and Bono is over on the “e” stage, and Bono reaches out his hand and the giant electronic Bono being broadcast on the screen suddenly has the tiny-by-comparison, real human Edge dancing in the palm of his hand. So many other neat moments on that screen that I won’t spoil for my friends who have yet to see the show. Whoever designed it should get some kind of an award, because it’s very, very well done. I’m usually anti-high-tech for rock shows, you know? I like them gritty, sweaty, human without too much fancy lighting or theatrical effects. But somehow, this band and this show manage to make it work so that it enhances the music and the narrative created by the music. WELL DONE.

“Well done” by the audience too, which sang along with great enthusiasm, especially on the big 1980s hits. My favorite had to be “Pride (In the Name of Love)” which you can just scream along to for days and when the whole arena is doing it, it’s just miraculously loud and joyous. And given recent events in this country, that song was especially resonant for a lot of us, I think. And (I know I’m jumping around a bit here), how about that bass line on “Bullet the Blue Sky”? Freaking incredible at that volume. Both nights, I had to sit down for a moment and just let that tremendous roar rumble through me. I cannot say enough good things about the U2 rhythm section. Adam Clayton – does anyone have more fun playing rockstar while playing propulsive, just-funky-enough bass lines? And Larry Mullen Jr. – for a guy who verges on scrawny, he certainly makes that drum kit thunder. His work on “Even Better Than the Real Thing” was a particular joy to behold. What a powerful heartbeat those two create.

Lastly, a word about “Every Breaking Wave.” I fell head over heels in love with this song when I heard bootlegs of early versions of it on the 360 tour. When I first heard the full band version on “Songs of Innocence” I felt like it had lost something, that it was maybe over-arranged, although I’ve grown to love that version too. On the i+e tour, there’s a piano that literally rises out of the “e” stage for just this one song, and the arrangement is simple – just the Edge on piano and Bono singing. It’s really lovely, and yet I feel like this song (which I still adore, in whatever form it takes) hasn’t found its best arrangement yet. To my ear, it’s still missing something. I’ll be interested to see how (if) it evolves over time.

Aftermath: a moment of surrender

The day after my two shows started out bleary and half-awake (because who can go to sleep within a few hours of so much energy?? so I was up late) – and became a flurry of excitement about five minutes after I sat down in the hotel breakfast room only to find out that the Supreme Court had just ruled in favor of marriage equality. It’s a bit surreal finding out news like that before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee. I spent the day doing a little sightseeing, then decamped to a good friend’s apartment and had dinner with four friends I don’t see nearly often enough. So fun, and so good for my heart and soul.

So… WalMart stopped selling confederate flags. People can marry who they want to. & Edge grinned at me from the stage. DO NOT WAKE ME UP.

— Anne H. (@annehaines) June 26, 2015

Saturday was an absolutely gorgeous day, lots of sun, low humidity – also a bit surreal after a very rainy stretch. I hit the road for the drive home and managed NOT to take any wrong turns in Gary, for once. At my first rest stop I checked Twitter to see what was happening in the world and found out about Bree Newsome committing a beautiful act of civil disobedience and taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina.

A bit later, I was blasting a bootleg from an earlier show on this U2 tour (I know I definitely liked a concert if two days later all I want to listen to is that same band, preferably live, preferably recent). Bono’s been singing a bit of “The Hands that Built America” at the beginning of “Pride” on this tour, and it’s (I know I keep using this word) lovely; when the opening notes of “Pride” rang out on the boot I turned it WAY up, blasting down the highway, singing at the top of my lungs. “In the name of love! What more in the name of love?”

And then “Beautiful Day” – at the line “after the flood, all the colors came out” I just started weeping. I was picturing the photos I’d seen of the White House and other landmarks, not to mention the Facebook profile photos of many of my friends, all lit up in rainbow lights to celebrate marriage equality. Who’d have thought I would see this in my lifetime? There is still a lot of work – a LOT of work – left to be done. But what a moment, all the same, you know?

I was picturing Bree Newsome up on that flagpole, taking down that symbol of the past, knowing she would probably be arrested and the flag would probably be put back up – but also knowing that her act would help millions of people take heart and find the courage to take some action of their own. I was thinking about how heroes are just brave, crazy, ordinary humans who are willing to be seen.

And I was thinking about how, at those two rock shows, all the technology was fantastic and yet what was I over the moon about? A minute of joyous eye contact exchanged with the guitarist. The pure ringing sound created by human fingers against steel strings, amplified a millionfold to become a clarion call. I thought about what it means to be human, what it means to put yourself out there, what it means to acknowledge the tension (a tension essential for both activism and rock & roll) between the need for independence and individuality and the longing for community, acceptance, love.

After the flood, all the colors came out. It was a beautiful day.

Driving down the highway, weeping so freely I had to pull over and get myself together before I could go on. Everything was just washing over me in a great flood, and I couldn’t stop it and I didn’t want to stop it. My heart felt open and my eyes felt open and I was holding so much gratitude for everything that is good in this world. And that’s a lot.

Oh! You look SO BEAUTIFUL tonight… you look so beautiful, rock & roll. You look so beautiful, those precious nights when you catch yourself fully living in the moment. You look so beautiful, humans who push themselves to the limit of what they are afraid of doing, what they need to do. Humans who take risks like pulling down symbols that hurt the people they love. Like singing for all you’re worth whether you are a rock star with bronchitis or a middle-aged lady in the middle of a crowd. Like facing headlong the breaking and the broken places in your heart, and making art out of them, and using that to bring people together somehow. You look so beautiful, humans who hurt each other and love each other and fight with and for each other. You look so beautiful tonight.

Thank you, U2. I needed that.

Chicago 1 setlist | Chicago 2 setlist

Crappy cellphone photos by Anne Haines; videos as credited on YouTube