U2’s Songs of Experience: Seeking Light and Love in the Darkness

A review of the band’s newest release

The opening song “Love is All We Have Left” on U2’s 14th album, Songs of Experience, includes a notable band “first”: after 41 years of the same four guys making music together, lead singer Bono finally has discovered how to use autotune. Described by the singer himself as “Frank Sinatra singing from the moon,” this new voice-altering development surprised me as a long-time fan. But what didn’t surprise me was the clear biblical connection made in the lyrics to 1 Corinthians 13. As Bono sings: “the only thing that can be kept / love is all we have left.” And as the Apostle Paul writes: “now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” The band’s 2014 release Songs of Innocence looked back on the influences that shaped the young U2 in the 1970s growing up. Now Songs of Experience explores what they’ve learned along the way, and what alone will remain after all is said and done.

U2’s lyrics have often echoed Scripture throughout their career, sometimes in subtle, other times in obvious ways. As the second track, “Lights of Home,” kicks in with a distinctive riff from guitarist The Edge and fantastic hip hop-based groove from bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen, Jr., the band shifts from contemplating the necessity of love to facing the certainty of death. Songs of Experience has, in fact, been described by Bono as his attempt to write personal “letters” from his heart to the people that he loves, with the process intensified particularly after he had a near death experience. On this modern sort of lament song, he begins with “I shouldn’t be here cause I should be dead” before crying out on the chorus “hey now / do you know my name? / or where I’m going?” His desperate question recalls the longing of the Prodigal Son to return home in Luke 15. Or perhaps the disciple Thomas wondering to Jesus: “we don’t know where you’re going, how can we know the way” (John 14:5)?

Any way you read it, this standout track from the album, coupled with the aforementioned opening song, set the tone for the rest of what follows on Songs of Experience: a collection of songs that grapple with mortality and brokenness in the world while remaining ultimately hopeful – to this listener, their best work in 20 years. “Joy is an act of defiance,” as Bono says, and that joy comes through in songs like “You’re The Best Thing About Me,” the first single from the album (and also given a glorious EDM remix by Norwegian DJ Kygo). The song was written about Bono’s wife Ali Hewson, whom he has been married to for 35 years and started dating the same year that he met his bandmates back in high school. “Get Out Of Your Own Way,” written for Bono’s daughters, provides an encouraging challenge to admit our own failings and mistakes as a necessary first step to lead and fight for a better world. Kendrick Lamar shows up to provide an ironic set of “Beatitudes” at the end of the song: “blessed are the liars…for the truth can be awkward,” he raps, providing the outro to one song and the intro to the next, “American Soul,” which loudly pleads for a return to the American identity of being a place of sanctuary and welcome for all people. At the heart of the song, Bono deliberately evokes Matthew 25:40: “whatever you did for least of these, you did unto me.”

At this point the album begins to blend the personal and the global (and also get even better, as the previous couple of songs are among the weaker on this album), morphing from a collection of letters to loved ones to first-person accounts of other individuals facing their own possible end. On my favorite song of the album, “Summer of Love,” Lady Gaga provides backing vocals to the heartbreaking real story of an Aleppo gardener maintaining his garden even in the midst of the constant bombing by the Syrian government (he was eventually killed). Following this impossibly catchy and yet emotionally devastating number is another song centered on current refugee experiences, “Red Flag Day,” an evocative and danceable tune that feels like it could belong on U2’s 1983 War album.

U2 Band Photo

The band gets a little more playful on “The Showman (Little More Better),” a song that draws influences from early Beatles and Beach Boys in order for Bono to make fun of himself as a performer, a constant theme throughout the band’s career. Also constant in the U2 canon are the kind of slow-building, epic fare that characterizes “The Little Things That Give You Away,” another standout from the album that could in time become a new U2 classic. “New U2 classic” is a phrase I’d use to describe “Landlady,” too, a beautiful ode once again from Bono to his wife that just might be the band’s best ballad since “One,” from their greatest album, Achtung Baby. The overall industrial/experimental sound of that particular album also gives “The Blackout” its character, as Clayton provides a slick bass riff, Mullen some ferocious drumming, and Bono and Edge sing of “the darkness where you learn to see.”

Despite the real darkness in the world, the album ends in true U2 fashion: with the arena-ready anthem “Love is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way” and then the slightly darker album closer “13 (There Is a Light),” which re-uses the chorus from “Song for Someone,” a song from Songs of Innocence, in a more subdued and yet somehow hard-hitting fashion. Since Songs of Experience was always envisioned as a companion album to the former album (inspired by English poet William Blake’s own “Song of Innocence and Experience”), this makes total sense, and is a neat and powerful way to conclude things on an album full of both powerful rockers and introspective ballads.

Driving home one night while listening to this final song, the words “are you tough enough to be kind?” hit me as words that I myself would love to sing to my three daughters as they continue to grow. For when “love is all we have left,” it’s the simple acts of kindness in the face of a cruel and uncertain world that can give us as followers of Jesus hope that, one day, all will be well. Having honest faith in the midst of uncertainty, working for social justice, and confronting a broken world with hope are all themes on this album, and what make U2 so meaningful for me and many others that continue to listen.

**The verdict: 4/5 stars. Standout tracks: Summer of Love, Landlady, The Little Things That Give You Away, Lights of Home, 13 (There is a Light)