Track by Track

With the album finally in the can, Edge, Bono and Adam offered an exclusive insight to U2.Com into how the different tracks came together - some took years, others seemed to come from nowhere in an evening. (Larry was travelling at the time of the interview for U2.Com, he'll be bringing site members up to date in future exclusive interviews!)

Read their thoughts on Vertigo and Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own.

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Vertigo // Audio

BONO

'Fear, paranoia, these are the type of things we wanted from 'Vertigo'. The album ends in quite an ecstatic place and, so we wanted to start off with a little bit of electric shock treatment. It's a club maybe, and you're supposed to be having the time of your life, but you want to kill yourself (laughs)...it's a light little ditty. These are nervous times, they really are, you turn on the news, you think 'Wow, who's next? My brother, my sister, my uncle, my aunt ...nervous times.'
'It's a dizzy feeling, vertigo, a sort of sick feeling, when you get up to the top of something and there's only one way to go - that's not a dictionary definition, that's mine. And in my head I create a club, called Vertigo, with all these people in it, and the music is just not the music you want to hear, the people are not the people you want to be with. And then you just see somebody, she's got a cross round her neck, and you kind of focus on it because you can't focus on anything else, and you find a little, tiny, fragment of salvation there.'

ADAM

'With 'Vertigo' we really wanted to have a vital, up, rock'n roll sort of track. We had been hearing that energy that had been coming off The Hives and The Strokes and The Vines and that had really connected with where we came from. I think Edge felt he could write and produce a riff that was even better than some of those.
'It sat around for a while and it was worked up as a song called 'Native Son' but was a bit third person in the delivery. In January we had a rewrite and it turned into 'Vertigo' which is so much more vital.
'It is harder and harder to get people's attention and if you don't try and grab their attention with a track that's indisputable, a track that really fires their imagination then they are not that interested in what the rest of the record is about.'

EDGE

'U2 are not really a rock'n roll band, that's the truth, we've never really been a rock'n roll band. But with 'Vertigo' I was trying to come up with a sound and guitar riff which was unashamedly full-on rock'n roll, like the best of that form which I do love, whether The Pistols or The Stones, whether punk or the best of metal.
'So I worked up some music and for a while it had the title of 'Full Metal Jacket' and I had some melody ideas on the music but nothing else I was really happy with it.
'The demo I worked up from some drum loops of Larry which was really the bench mark for the tune for quite a while and we didn't really better it until the take that is on the album. That was one of those moments when everybody arrived and came together at the same moment - and it was immediately clear to everyone in the room that we had just hit the best take on that song that we had ever done. (When) Bono came up with some great new melody ideas we were pretty much there.
' It took a while though. We recorded 'Vertigo' in a couple of different ways, in fact there was a whole other song written over the music called 'Native Son' which we finished up, mixed and everything - it was really good but it didn't have what we thought this tune had which was the complete attitude. We abandoned 'Native Son' as perhaps a little too earnest in the end, I think that's where we went off it.'

Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own // Audio

BONO

'I sang 'Sometimes You Can't Make it On Your Own' at my father's funeral. He was a very tough, old boot of a guy, Irish, Dub, north side of Dublin, very cynical about the world and the people in it, you know, but very charming, and funny with it.
'His whole thing was, 'Don't dream - to dream is to be disappointed'. That was really what I think was his advice to me. He didn't speak it in those words, but that's what he meant, and of course that's really a recipe for megalomania isn't it? I mean I was only ever interested in big ideas, and not so much dreaming but putting dreams into action, doing the things that you have in your head has become an important thing for me.
The song 'Sometimes You Cant Make it On Your Own', was dedicated to him, and, it's a portrait of him - he was a great singer, a tenor, a working class Dublin guy who listened to the opera and conducted the stereo with my mother's knitting needles. He just loved opera, so in the song, I hit one of those big tenor notes that he would have loved so much. I think he would have loved it, I hope so.'

EDGE

'It's very hard when people refer to one of our old songs and say' Can you write another song as good as 'Where the Streets Have no Name' or 'One?' These are the kind of songs people refer to, but I think on this record, we may have a couple of songs which are equally as good, maybe even better. In some ways I am still too close to really say for sure if I even believe it myself - and in the end what I believe is not that important, it's what everyone else thinks that will decide if the songs on this record are as good as our best work, so I am happy to just see what people think.'