U2 are among the artists I have the longest and deepest relationship with, going back to pretty much day one of my life as a music obsessive. There are some artists I have this sort of relationship where I can endorse pretty much everything they’ve ever made, artists who’ve rarely if ever been embarrassing or pursued creative directions that didn’t suit them at all. U2 don’t make it easy. U2 have created some of the best music I’ve heard and some of the most cringe, and even at their best they’re more likely to make a goofy decision than a cool decision.
This is a long way of saying if you’ve wondered who their new record of 40 remakes of songs throughout their catalog is for, it is for people like me. I’m invested enough in The Edge in particular to be fascinated by how he approaches translating his own style, especially when he’s trying to drastically reduce things crucial to his aesthetic – implied scale, odd electronic textures, density of sound. I’m interested enough in Bono to want to him compensate for his reduced vocal range with different approaches to phrasing, and taking his tendency to rewrite lyrics on the spot in shows back into the studio. While I’m sure some of the new versions of old songs will take on lives of their own, particularly through use in television and film, Songs of Surrender is for hardcore fans. The revisions here are meant to be additive, a new way of hearing something familiar. Nothing is being replaced, and at best the songs are enhanced with a new perspective on their musical and lyrical character. (That said, the material from Innocence and Experience is mostly greatly improved by scraping off all the “this has to be a radio hit” gloss of producers like Ryan Tedder and Paul Epworth.)
“Dirty Day” is one of my all-time favorite U2 songs. It’s a song about how complicated relationships between fathers and sons can be, especially when the son is old enough to be a father too. Bono has written a fair number of songs about his relationship with his father – “Kite” is about Bono’s experience of preparing for his dad’s death while he was dying, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” one album later reflects on their strained relationship after he passed. In all of these songs Bono’s father is portrayed as stern and stubborn, emotionally distant but affectionate in unexpected ways, and a man who offered wisdom in ways that were often blunt and abrasive. The power of the songs is in how much Bono yearns for this man’s love and approval, and how frustrated he is that the things that make them alike are what pushed them apart.
“Dirty Day,” written many years before either of those songs, focuses on the tension. In the context of Zooropa the song is in sharp contrast with “Lemon,” one of several U2 songs in which Bono tries to connect with his mother, who died when he was very young. She exists mainly as an idealized memory; in that song he’s extrapolating as much as he can from a bit of video footage from when she was alive. “Dirty Day” is largely about familiarity breeding contempt, and too much messy history getting in the way of important things. Many of the lyrics are adapted from things Bono’s father had said to him, and I think Bono was trying to understand something about him by singing from his perspective. A lot of these words were clearly meant to deflate Bono, to force him into recognizing how futile some things are, how there’s no satisfying explanation for a lot of things. The most haunting line is somewhere between a promise and a threat – “I’m in you, more so when they put me in the ground.”
The Edge’s new arrangement for “Dirty Day” cuts out all the ambience and weight of the original version, and transposes the main bass part to cello much like the Garbage remix of the song from the “Please” single. The recording is unusually raw for U2, so minimal and closely mic’d that you can hear hands pressing down on strings and squeaking on fretboards, or what sounds like Bono adjusting his body in his chair as he sings. It’s almost uncomfortably intimate, and Bono’s voice is low and sometimes a little whispery, like he’s doing U2 ASMR. The additional strings bring a mournful quality to the music, trading the passive-aggressive antagonism in the original for lamentation. This arrangement reorients everything in the song around lingering regret for how life was actually lived, and Bono inhabiting his father’s perspective now seems more like proof that his father is with him more in death than he ever was in his life.
