The Edge

Published Mar 28, 2023, 9:00 AM

U2’s The Edge is one of only a handful of guitarists who's as recognizable as his band’s wildly successful frontman. U2 has been playing together since 1976, when they were all teenagers in Dublin. Nearing their 50-year anniversary as a band, U2 just released their latest album, Songs of Surrender—a 40-track collection of reimagined and stripped down songs that span the entirety of their catalog.

On today’s episode Rick Rubin talks to The Edge about his theory behind the band’s longevity. The Edge also shares stories about writing U2 classics like “New Year’s Day” and “Where The Streets Have No Name.” And he explains why Bono singing at the top of his range can be a bit much.

You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite U2 songs HERE.

Pushkin. I want to let you know that Rick has a new podcast called Tetragrammaton. After about four to five years of recording Broken Record, Rick decided he wanted to talk to more than just musicians, so on his new podcast, he'll be talking to actors, directors, wrestlers, business people, anyone that Rick finds interesting. So make sure to subscribe to Tetragrammaton wherever you listen to podcasts. You Two's The Edge is one of only a handful of guitarists as famous as his band's frontman. The Edge and Bono have been together as You two since their early days as teenagers in Dublin. They started the band in nineteen seventy six, and in the years since they've become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, releasing a consistent stream of hit records decade after decade or decade. Nearing their fifty year anniversary as a band, You two just released another album, Songs of Surrender. It's a forty track collection of reimagined and stripped down songs that span the entirety of You Two's catalog. The band is also preparing for the Las Vegas residency that starts this fall at the Venetians MSG sphere. On today's episode, Rick Rubin talks to the Edge about his theory behind the band's longevity. Plus he shares stories about writing YouTube classics like New Year's Day and Where the Streets Have No Name. The Edge also explains why Bono singing at the top of his range can be a bit much. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Ruben's conversation with The Edge. So, how the hell are you, Rick? I'm feeling pretty good. How about you? Yeah, I must say, cannot complain congratulations on the new album, Thank You. It's radical, it's radical. It struck us that there's very few acts you could do this, which is have a serious look back at recorded work from earlier years, because most groups are not around. You know that the full members are not with us. So it was a thrill not only to get to do it, but also feeling like we're doing something, as you say, radical, something that's never been done. Yes, it's beautiful, and it struck me as it had an honesty about it that really was touching. Yeah, and it felt like it was true to you and it felt really refreshing. Yeah. Well, because we had to move so fast and because we were allowing the music to lead us. I think it's got a kind of ease about it, you know. The the songs just are you know, and they're different versions for sure, and we've taken quite a few liberties, but the songs shine, and they shine because we've done a radical thing. We've decided to really serve the voice and the lyrics and get out of the way as much as possible, So the arrangements are really sparse and very simple in most cases. How did the idea come about to do this? It was knocking around for a while because, as people who've been to our shows will know, occasionally we would take a song from an album that was a full band arrangement that we'd strip it down and we'd play it. Often it would just be binding myself and me on acoustic guitar or possibly piano, and those versions sometimes became the most iconic arrangements. I'm thinking of Staring at the Sun or Ordinary Love or Every Breaking Way recently, so there's always this thought, well, why don't we try that with more of our songs to see where it leads us? And then when the pandemic caused this lockdown. I'm one of those people who works on music all the time, but it seemed like the perfect moment to add into what I would normally be doing, which is where coming new stuff. To add in this other project is to explore arrangement ideas for these songs. And so, with no pressure, no expectation at sort of record company that there would be a new YouTube record coming, we just started experimenting and I would try a few arrangement ideas then bring them to Bono and he would saying, see how it sounded, and it just kind of grew, and the whole project then developed its own momentum as we got deeper into the material and the whole collection started to have its own sort of personality. And the one thing that we really wanted to try and do was bring an intimacy to performances because as a young band particularly, we often found ourselves with versions of our songs with Bono's singing at the very top of his range, which is an amazing sound. I mean, you know, the instrument of Bonnah House is powerful, but it can be a little much, you know, if you're if you're at home and you want to chill. You know, it's like you don't necessarily go to those early YouTube records because they're just so intense. So we were we thought, well, with this distance of experience and time, you know, going back to those early versions and rearranging them so Bono's singing within his range and he's got the dynamic opportunity to kind of add light and shade. We just thought would be interesting, and it turned out to be the kind of secret weapon was intimacy. It became our kind of new punk rock. Yeah. No, it's it's beautiful, and it's a beautiful idea. And I think in some ways the extremes are always what's interesting. So very loud is interesting, and in the same way, very quiet interesting. I can remember when I first discovered Eric Satia, and I was still relatively punk rocker at the time, but something about this music spoke to me in a way that other things didn't. And then I remember visiting Ian McKay in Washington, DC, and I got to his house and there was an Eric Sati album sitting there. It's like something's going on. Something, It's like there's something and it's those it's the edges, it's what's interesting around the edges, and now you're experimenting on the other side. And I love it. I love it, and it feels maybe when I was saying the honesty of it is, this feels more like what I imagine you would put on and actually listen to in real life. Well a lot of the time, that's true. I mean, you know, you got to remember when we were kids, putting on a record was an occasion, you know, because there weren't that many records around, or interesting records, and those that had them, you know, we would get to know them so we could go over to their place and listen. So putting on an album, you wouldn't have music much of the time. You'd only have it when you decided you were going to go and have a record listening session or on radio, I guess. But today, of course, speak up access to music at all times, so music becomes the soundtrack to every part of your day. And I think this is you know, there's a need at times to have this kind of music that is just with you, but in a softer, more intimate way. When you were growing up, was their music playing in your household or not so much? There was we had a record player. My dad's record collection was mostly kind of the classic crooners of the fifties, Franks and and there was her Valpert, those sorts of records, a couple of jazz records. But he was just that little bit too old to really get rock and roll, so he didn't have any not even a Beatles record. So when my brother and I were, you know, young, like eight nine years old, I remember we got a gift of a five pound note for Christmas from one of our grandparents, so we said, let's buy an album together, so we bought Sergeant Peppers. We decided that was going to be our joint purchase, and that was kind of the first rock and roll album in our household. And then subsequently, obviously as we got a little older and got more gifts from our grandparents, those that record collection grew slowly. But I mean, think about that, it was that rare. You know, you find your friends who had these records like led Zeppelin record or Dylan record or a Jimmy Hendricks record, and you'd borrow them if you possibly could. And now it's everywhere, and I don't know there's good and bad to that, but I certainly enjoy having access to everything and eric side to somebody. I love it too, by the way, and I think your streaming numbers are surprisingly high. Interesting. Interesting would you say, did you fall in love with music at that time when when it was shared with your brother and what Sergeant Pepper? Was that sort of the beginning of your connection to music? It was, And you know, we were our family was from Wales, moved to Ireland, so you know, growing up, you know, we all kind of made inroads into the local social scene as kids, but there's always that little sense of being an outsider. And I think music was a great place to kind of go and and just spend time. So yeah, it was a refuge for me definitely. And I would listen to records, particular records that I loved. I'd listen hundreds of times because they were rare and I got to know every single nuance of those records. And this was before you started playing, Is this correct? Yeah? The first instrument I ever tried to play would have been piano one It is probably about ten. Didn't go so great because I had a very good ear, but a kind of music dyslexia, so there's no chance I was ever going to be able to read music nearly as easily as hear it and copy. So my ear kind of has been someways my greatest asset, but definitely early on stopped me from understanding notation or really finding my way into that because I just didn't get us. I didn't like it. I understood then, probably around thirteen, my brother was given a cheap, little acoustic guitar and the two of us learned basic chords just open chords is just so we could sing and play. And that was the beginning of when I got really interested in learning an instrument. And then would you play along with records? At that time? I would, and not just records. I mean it got to the point where I would play along to the TV show that whatever we were. This is a small family house, so we're all, you know, in the TV room, and I can't stop myself picking up the guitar and I'm just playing along, and I remember getting pillows thrown at me to shut up. I was just doing everyone's head in with this incessant guitar line. But again, it's the ADHD whatever. Once I got into the guitar, I really sort of did a deep dive and Luckily early on there was there's a couple of guitar players that I fell in love with, Rory Gallaher very early on, being Irish, being you know, a great guitar player, so I would play along to his records. And then that was when I was probably about fifteen. And then suddenly punk rock happens, and suddenly it's like the Clash, the Jam, all these amazing groups in the UK and Patti Smith and then television. So suddenly, as a young guitar player, I'm getting all this sort of incoming exposure to radically different kinds of guitar approaches, and I was like, whoa. And that was a big inspiration, not just what they were doing, but the sense that they could do something different. You know, I sensed it was not the same set of ideas as the sort of white rock, which you know I found early on. I liked Lizzie, but certain point it just seemed like it didn't have much imagination. But this work, you know, Patti Smith and television particularly, they were like, wow, that is that's different, That's coming from other place. It opened the door to possibilities, whether whether you were going to go down the same path as them or not. It showed there's another way, and there could be many other ways as it turns out. Yeah, I mean I was. I was so fortunate so that you know, people like John Miguel from Magazine and Susan the Banshees, and there was some great guitar players, just so many at that moment that we're doing new things, and I was just lapping it all up at all times. About how old were you at that time? Well, this was seventy seven, so I would have been seventy seven. I would have been sixteen. Yeah, punk rock happened kind of just as I was turning fifteen. Do you remember what the very first punk record you heard was. I think the first punk song I heard was probably the Jazz on Top of the Pumps. The Jam on Top of the Pops was a moment because the sheer energy of it, you know, and the fact that these guys were probably only about three or four years older than us. It really felt suddenly not only was it possible to write your own songs, but actually get some notice. So that was a big encouragement to us at that time because it was music we could play. We love the Ramones for the same reason. They were probably the first cover of something that was from the punk kind of tradition, and we did a bunch of Ramones songs. That was probably all we could play at that point. I love the Ramones. That my first experience of punk rock was the Ramans and it changed my life. Yeah, they were real outliers. If you think of how you connected to music, then how do you say your relationship to music has changed since childhood? Well, I think when you're a kid, you tend to sort of have your real favorites and you you're not maybe as curious about things outside of that genre of that form. So we went through a whole phase where we absolutely had no interest in the blues, no interest in really an African American music, because that to us had been as a sort of form, had been so strongly associated with the music before punk rock. So we we would have real prejudices against us copying any of those ideas of forms. So certain guitar styles we just wouldn't we wouldn't allow them in our music. Bending of notes, you know, something as simple as that, we just weren't into it. The third, which is in musical terms, the note that gives you a major chord or a minor chord. We wouldn't play thirds. We just wanted our music to be very open and hard to pin down, so I would plays that were just made of the root and the fifth, which means it has no sex. It's it's in terms of the chord gender. If you want. Today, I'm much more open, And I suppose where I'm at these days is songs. You know, they seem to be an eternal thing. If you hit on a song that is outside of time in the sense of the moment in culture, you know, if it's timeless, that's the highest goal. I think. So therefore everybody from coal Porter and a bird backreck stuff. I wouldn't have abba, you know, the bee jeans, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have listened to any of that stuff when I was sixteen. But now I feel like there's a lot there for me to learn. It's beautiful. Having a parochial view of style early on can be really helpful in terms of defining your sound, so it can work to your advantage to see, I'm only going to play this, I'm only going to do this. This is our sound, and you define your sound and then when you break free of that. It allows incredible growth and change over time. You're not starting with the palette of everything. You're starting with a limited palette. But it was based on your taste. It It was honest, you know, these are the things I like. We're going to work within this framework, and it's beautiful. And then finding ways now to say, okay, now I like the things that I rejected, Then how can these elements be integrated and still be true to what it is that we do exactly? And limitations can end up being really crucial defining characteristics. Sickly working with Brianino. You know, Brian would have been a person who understood technology, possibly more than he understood music, as in terms of music theory. And we were working with Ryan and we were at one point we were saying, you know, we're not like virtuosos, you know, and he was going, well, that's cool, you know, that's not important to think about the velvet underground. I mean, these guys were they had incredible intelligence and creativity. But you know, mo Tucker was, you know, a drummer who played the songs, but she was not one of the great drummers. And Lou was a really decent guitar play. He's not Jimmy Hendrickson. We realized, oh yeah, you know, those limitations can turn into strengths, and that was a big insight in some ways. That's what the punk rock revolution was about. Was and the hip hop revolution as well, was it was taking the music out of the conservatory and back to the streets, and it was for everybody. Everyone who had a conception or something to say could participate. Yeah, it democratized in a way. That's amazing, because that was the problem with music prior to punk was that it seemed so at least it seemed like, you know, if you weren't a virtuoso musician, then you didn't didn't get a chance to get into playing live and making records. And also there was that sense of the tablets of Stone descending from on High to us mere immortals, and you know, that got very boring and extremely pretentious around that time. And so we were into even then, we were into the bands that could put it together on a single three and a half minute, forty five vinyl record. So the Ramones could do that, the Kinks could do that, Iggy Pop, and the Stones obviously, the Beatles and they were our heroes for that reason. We just loved those rock and roll forty fives. Did you watch The Top of the Pops every week? Yeah, pretty much religiously. And then there was one other show called The Old Grow Whistle Test and that was the same. We would watch it every week. So told the Pops had pistols. On one occasion they played pretty vacant and that was mind blowing. But the Ogo whistle Test had all the touring acts, so the Cramps were playing, you know, all that, so that was a great one to catch and they would do in that case, they do like two or three songs. They wouldn't just do one. Great The Cramps was the first punk rock show I got to see when I was probably it was probably fifteen or sixteen, and it was mind blowing. It changed my life forever. Amazing band. What would have been the music that was playing on the radio back when you're a kid, Well, I mean a lot of it was was the pop music of the day, and some of it was was actually really good, but some of it was terrible. So when I was a really young kid, there was a sort of glam explosion, so it was everything from Bowie to Mark Bowland, Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust, all these artists from the UK who was sort of right think the wave of this new Glam movement, which I suppose was interesting because it brought androgyny into rock and roll, you know, like I suppose Mick had played around a bit with it, Mick Jagger, but Bowie and Mark Bowland really kind of took it to the next level. And you know, it was eyeliner, but it was the music actually was a lot of it was really good. And then Abbot, I guess would have been huge at that time, but in terms of guitar music, a lot of it didn't reach me, you know, and I was such a Beatles fan. I really didn't like the sort of progressive rock of that time. I quite liked a band called Yes because I think that had some good, good ideas, but a lot of it just left me completely cold. So I was drawn to Alice Cooper and Slade and these guitar bands that had tunes, you know, that had some good songs. That was the thing that was attracted me. Was you two your first band, the first band you were in, Yeah, I mean we were very early days. We called us Feedback and that was when we were doing covers, and you know, we were kids. And then when the punk thing happened, we called ourselves the Hype for a while, and we were starting to write our own songs, but still mostly doing covers. And then you Two, when we really started to get serious about our own songwriting, we called usselves you two and that. Yeah, so, and how old were the members of the band when you all met? We were all in high school together, and so I would have been fifteen, Larry would have been fifteen, Adam sixteen. And really when when we got together, it was it was more about just something fun to do on a Saturday, you know. It wasn't knowing any idea of taking more seriously than that. And we were kids, so the transcision from the hobby to thinking, wow, we have something was a slow one, but fun enough. The spark, that thing that you recognize when you play with somebody else, that spark was there quite early on, even as we were playing other people's material. There was a chemistry there that we all recognized. And the only band I think I've ever been in where except for one, I got a gig with a country band at age sixteen for one night and it was a band called the Drifting Cowboys and we're basically doing country songs and I got paid and that was that's the first time I actually ever got paid to play guitar. Amazing. We'll be back after a quick break with more from Rick Rubin and The Edge. We're back with The Edge. Did you ever feel connection to any traditional Irish music just because such a big part of the Irish culture, the folk songs and the traditional tunes. Was that in your life at all? You know, I knew that it was there, but you know, at that stage, I really didn't find it interesting. I didn't find it engaging. I mean, I suppose for us as kids in Dublin was in those days and the sort of late seventies was quite a gray place. There wasn't a huge amount going on. So music was an escape, you know, it was it was like a window to something else going on in another part of the world. So the last thing we wanted to do was listen to her, you know, traditional Irish music, to be reminded of what we were very well aware of every day, which was Ireland at that time. Now I look back and it's it's beautiful music. There's actually a huge revival of folk and traditional music happening right now in Ireland, and some great new groups langcom Ye, Vagabonds, Lisa O'Neil. These are really regarded new folk and traditional artists, but back then not really understood. Please feel free to share any of the new ones that you like, just because I like all kinds of music and I don't know about this movement, so that's exciting. How did you first connect with Eno, Well, we made our first few records with Steve Lillywhite, and he had this idea in his head that he would only do one album per artist. That was this thought, but in our case, he broke his rule and he actually did the first three you tube records. But then we're coming up to recond number four and even we are at this point going, let's think of working with somebody new and fresh, just to keep it interesting. So we were swapping ideas and names, and I particularly loved Before and After Science, which is Brian's solo album, and we all liked Talking Heads, and we loved the work he's done with Bowie, so he kind of bubbled up to the top of our list of like, well, this guy, we'd love to work with Brian if we could persuade him. So we kind of mounted a little bit of a campaign and through management we got in touch with him and we had a meeting with him in London. Actually it was Dublin. He came to Dublin and he said he came pretty much with the idea that he was going to turn down the offer. But in the course of our conversations, I think we realized how much we had in common in terms of the music we liked, but also our ambitions for sonics and experimenting with sound. So he found himself at the end of the trip going, I think I want to work with these guys, and so he's slightly hedging his bets. He'd decided he would bring his friend from Canada, fellow called Danny Lanois, who at that point had been on dozens of records as a kind of producer but local to Canada. And we had some songs pretty much in good shape, maybe without lyrics. But I remember a few days before, a week before Brian was to arrive to start work, we had this sort of crisis of confidence in material. So Steve Lilly might happen to be in town, so we grabbed Steve and I said, look, should we cancel the sessions. We're not sure we have anything. He said, well, blame me what you got. So we played him a version of Pride in the Name of Love and a sort of homecoming and Unforgettable Fire and he said, m I think you guys are going to be fine. I don't think you need to worry about the songs. You got some good things here. So we started working with Brian and Danny and we decided for that album, rather than being in a recording studio with the sort of limited acoustic properties, we rented Slain Castle, which is this sort of medieval castle north of Dublin City, and what it had was these enormous rooms with the possibility of recording, you know, in these spaces that would add so much to the color and flavor of the music. So we decamped to Slay Castle and had like, I think it was six weeks, that's all we had. But we had so much fun with Brian and Danny because they both, I mean, as well as being incredible musicians, they both shared so much of our kind of curiosity about sound and it was just a pleasure to work with them and I've obviously worked at them many times since. That's fantastic. It's so nice when those those magic moments happen, that you find a great collaborator and it just works and you get to do it for a long period of time. It's golden. Yeah. Yeah, And I mean I would credit Brian and Danny with with, you know, really bringing our music up at the level. You know, We'd already had a bit of success on the War album, so we were doing pretty well, but in terms of the dimensionality and the kind of experimental qualities, they really upped our game. This is a personal question. You could answer it anyway you like, but tell me what you think each band member. You can include yourself in this. Each band member's biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses are and this is only from your point of view. This is not a broad view of how the world sees it, just from your seat, right. Well, start with Adam Adams probably are least conventional musician in the band, and that his grasp of even the basic idea rules of music is very tenuous. So Adam brings a kind of unorthodox quality to our work, which is hugely important. So he would often do something that no one else would ever have thought of, and to him it's just as valid as the things that most people would consider to be obvious. To him, there's no difference. So that's a huge strength to our band, and over the years there's a great example of that with Bullet the Blue Sky. So that's a that's a tune. We're in the studio demoing a bunch of songs and I've been listening to this band called The Fall, and I've been one of their songs is this really jagged, cool sort of guitar part. So I'm in I'm in the rehearsal space and I'm starting to figure out this guitar part and I've got something different but sort of in the same vein, and I'm just playing this part and I see Adam and Larry coming in because they've heard this, and I think this is cool. So they join in, and I suddenly realized they're playing it at in halftime, meaning I mean, here is dadda and they so and I'm like looking at them, going they just don't get it, you know, this is what are they doing? So Adam comes up this incredible bass part, but I'm I go back into the control and Bona's in there, and I'm like, well that was a bit of a mess, and Bonna's going, no, listen, this is so cool. And I listened back, and sure enough, the way they were hearing it, David a completely different twist, and you know, we kept the bass part, we kept the drum part, I changed some of the guitar and stuff. But that was just an example where you really you get great positives from differences of sensibility and how you hear things. So that's Adam. I just have one quick question about that, which is, from that moment, did it then open your mind to possibilities in general? Like did you become a different musician after that experience. Yes, I mean I think that's all part of recognizing limitations as strengths, and I think that whole album The Joshua Tree had many examples of that. One of my favorite stories on that front is another Adam's story. We were doing where the Streets of No Name, and we played this take and it had a great energy, really cool vibe. But if you were to listen to the individual instruments, they weren't particularly in time, you know, they'd be fairly substantial sort of swings and periods where you know, there was a lot of tension rather than everything being in the pocket, you know, things were kind of struggling to stay in the pocket. And I remember Adam actually got quite overwhelmed at one point by the fact that we couldn't get the perfect take. So we were working with this particular version where the Streets of No Name, and eventually really got something we were very happy with. But Steve Lillywhite came in towards the end of the project to help us mix the album to get these songs over the line, and Dad and he sat him down. He said, look, Steve, if you are mixing Streets, you should know that there's one base part here, which was an overdub that we've We've spent hours getting it perfectly in time. And then there's the one that Adam played live, and every rough mix that we've done with the overdub, we've all decided it sounds terrible. The one with that tension in it where it's out of time is the one to use. So anyway, Steve starts his mix and he puts up the floor base as we call it. Now He's going, this is wildly out of time, I'm not using that, so we put up the other one. It's like sitting as it should in the pocket with the drums, and he does his rough mix and he's getting close to finished and he calls us all in and we come in. Apparently I don't remember this, but he Steve does. We all came in and we're going, oh, sounds terrible. What have he done. It's like, this is an awful mix. It's terrible, Steve, whatever you're doing, it's just not working. So it's like taken aback. So he says, well, he remembers this conversation with Danny. He swaps out the basses. Well does this help? And we all went there. It is. That's the mix mate. That sounds great, and that's what's on the albums, so incredible. Again, the idea of what's right and correct is often not right and correct. So with Larry, I'd say Larry's great strength again as a musician is Larry plays to the to the vocal. Larry doesn't play to the guitar, he doesn't play to the bass. Larry plays drums to the to the singer. Which is why he's such a great drummer because all his nuances and his inflections and the groove he's picking up from the vocal. So when it's funny, when you listen to the monitor mixes of the band, you get this inside. So my monitor mix is basically a full blend of everyone's instruments with the guitar and my voice slightly elevates it. Follows is kind of the same, but with his voice elevates it. Adam has mostly kicked drum and a little bit of a voice and a little bit of guitar, but really it's base and basin kickdrum, and then Larry is drums and the voice and a mighty bit of guitar. So that quality I think for a musician, that drummer, he's just there with the voice the whole time. I think that's why he's so good, beautiful. And then myself, I'm my strength, I suppose would be my ear, my musical ear. So to me music I feel it very viscerally. You know, it's not intellectual to me, it's just it's like in my gut is where I receive music. So writing and for four is very instinctive rather than technical. So that's the strength. The weakness I suppose would be the exact thing, not technical. So sometimes you know, not knowing as much theory as as I ought to leaves you slightly a hostage to inspiration. You know, you're not necessarily have the way to get out of a problem using just plain old theory. With Barow, he's also incredibly instinctive and will will find amazing melodic ideas. And again I think it's to do with growing up as we did on stage. This sort of innate understanding of what a great melody is and what is going to reach an audience means that you know, when he hits on something, it's going to ring like a bell. It's like you know that melodic idea is going to travel. It's got potency. So that's his great talent, I think. I think the other strength we have as a band is this sense of trust and us all having a common goal that binds us together. So we're all looking out for each other's backs at all times, you know, So when when Larry sits behind the drum kit to figure out a part, we're kind of there to add commons, help whatever, And the same with me Bo or Adam. It's like there's there's three guys have your back when you're coming up with your ideas, which I think is a huge strength. You mentioned that music isn't intellectual to you, it's more instinctual, and that plays well with the idea of the right way would be the intellectual way. The instinctual way is the one that just sounds good to you, you know, the one that that feels good, doesn't have to follow any rules. If it feels good to you, that's the ultimate taste. Is I feel it, So it's good, doesn't matter what the math of it is, and we don't need to know the math of it. Yeah, And I wanted to ask if you feel like that there's a spiritual dimension to that. Yes, I mean whether you however you describe spiritual, and there's so many different versions of that. I do really believe that. I've been reading a great book recently called Notes on Complexity. It's it's actually a science book that explains the limitations of science. And what it introduces is the idea that our insights as creators, as inventors, as scientists often are outside of any kind of explanation, any logic. They are the kind of leaps of insights. And I think of songwriting that way, it's like you get this vision in your mind's ear, you hear like a complete song sometimes or when we're playing together, you know, you just find you're reaching for notes, so you don't necessarily know what the note is or why you're going there, but it emotionally makes sense. So to me, there's a sort of this consciousness in the small sea sense, which is the individual consciousness, but there's also a kind of collective consciousness, big sea consciousness, which we can access, and it's when you access that that you're really kind of you're not just being inspired. I think there's a kind of a higher level again, where you can kind of access things that you couldn't you couldn't normally do, and you couldn't possibly explain how you got there, but suddenly you've arrived. Some are very unique, and I think that's true for some of the great breakthroughs in science as well, like Einstein and his theory of relativity. He didn't sit down with a slide rule and go, well, that must mean such and such. He saw it does a vision and then figured out the mathematics to make sense of it afterwards. So I feel I think that's the spiritual dimension and of course, I mean I do have a faith, so I'm not saying that that's not true for me, you know, the more specific faith in existence of God. But I suppose I can see it being true if you have no belief in God, if you just see it as being open to to these other levels of consciousness. Yes, and whatever creative energy brings forth everything in on the planet. You know, there's some there's something productive going on, because the trees are growing, there's something happening, there's some energy. Well, I mean my definition of God is the creative force of the energy, you know, and of the universe, the creative energy of the universe, because I mean, if you start looking at the Big Bang and all the theories about this universe existing, you realize it's a miraculous thing. There's no explanation for it. I mean, it shouldn't exist. And the only way that the cosmologists of today can sort of rationalize the mathematics of the improbability of it is through the multiverse that there are in fact an infinite number of universes. And somebody was explaining how improbable it is that our planet exists with life and sentient life. Instead, it'd be like flying a plane at like ten thousand feet throwing random letters out the window, and that a Shakespeare play is formed on the ground. It's like beyond much too much. So I'm I'm much more with the program of some creative and energy whatever, whatever that is, whatever that is. I just heard a story about Einstein's theory of relativity, which was from the time that he presented it to the people of the powers that be in the science community, he was basically called a quack for twenty one years. Took twenty one years until they finally recognized the theory of relative For twenty one years, he was crazy and it was impossible by the powers that be. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. It's such a radical idea, and yeah, it turned everything on its head, but it turns out to be absolutely on the money. Yeah, and then there's a whole other this is interesting, you might like, there's a whole group of other researchers called the Thunderbolt maybe it's called the Thunderbolt Project who actually believe that Einstein was wrong and that everything that has been built on Einstein's philosophy, everything we think in physics is not true. Based on that everything since then has been wrong, which is again interesting. Again. I don't I don't have a I don't have a horse in the race. But I love that there are people thinking about it. It's like maybe the thing that we thought was impossible as possible, Maybe the thing that we're sure of is not the way it is. It seems like a healthy outlook to continue this creative unfolding. Well, I mean, every every scientific idea is called a theory, yeah, because at any time they could end up being proved to be incomplete or inaccurate in some way. Newtonian physics was it for so many centuries, and when relativity was first brought to the public attention, it turned Newton's ideas on its head. So it quite likely could happen again to Einstein's ideas. But I think the scientific method is what's important that we use for something as as important as science, that we use that method. And I think you can't mix science and faith. You can use inspiration from metaphysics if you want to arrive at a new theory, but the actual the proving out of that theory has to be methodical and scientific, absolutely, and I think most scientists would probably agree with that. I think so many scientists are are spiritual beings and that's how they find their way into the new ideas. It's not not at all uncommon. Yeah. One of one of my friends is a particle physicist and I guess cosmologist Brian Coxesnim. He works at certain particle accelerator and he's also a great communicator on science. So he does a lot of TV shows and actually does live concerts, which is quite interesting to go and see somebody lecturing about black hole theory to you know, two thousand people. It's really I would recommend going to one of the show. He is not an atheist, he's an agnostic. But one of his friends is a bishop, and they've sat on many occasions going over the differences between the sort of belief systems. One is purely scientific and one is theological, and they've decided this very little difference. The only real difference is that the bishop believes that the existence of God is eternal, omnipotent, and therefore truth and you know, insight and understanding is both universal and omnipotent. And what Brier would say is no, I think that sort of insight and understanding is about human beings. Here and now on planet Earth. So it didn't exist before us, it won't exist after us unless some other life form has developed this level of intexual development. But that's the only difference. And I think that if you just approach spirituality as like they're all truth seeking, that's what it is. Yes, and we're all have a slightly different version of but it's the same set of questions that we're all trying to answer. Yeah, and they seem to get us to the same place. Same true with all of the faiths, or so many of the faiths seem to be many streams leading to the same river, you know, the eternal truths seem to be in all of them. Yeah, And it's a different approach with science, it's it's much more methodical. But I think it was Carl Sagan who said that he put forward the idea that humanity is the means by which the universe understands itself. Without humanity, it's there. Yes, there is no understanding of it, or appreciation of it or celebration of it. Yes. Well, there's a great gift that we have and a certain responsibility. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with the Rest of Rix Conversation with the Edge. We're back with the Rest of Rix Conversation with the Edge. How do you think your band has managed to stay together all of these years when it seems like practically none of your contemporaries have been able to do that. You know, we do it because we love it, and we do it because we love working with each other. And you know, there's been times where we haven't loved the idea of working with each other and being together, and you know, so we have to give each other time, you know, time off, time to be away. But bottom line, I think it's because we all know instinctively that we shine individually the brightest when we're in this collective. So the collective works for us beautiful, and it works for all of us because we're not really in competition if you think about it, you know, it's like think about say the Beatles. You know, you've got three lead singers and three great songwriters who are trying to get their song on the album. You know, the case of George, he had a harder time than Paul and John, but they're amazing talents, all of them. And you could make the argument probably for any one of their songs, Well maybe one of the other guys should have sung the lead on this. So in our band, it's not like that we each have our own area of expertise, you know. With me, it's sort of compositional responsibilities. That's what I do. I'm the lead composer. Bono's melodically responsible and lyrically responsible. Adam and Larry are there as part of making our music unique and different. And Larry's a better drummer because he's playing with me and Adam. And I'm a better guitar player because I'm playing with Larry and Adam and Adams. You know, the bass player is because Larry and me and Bono. So I think in that way it's a reliance, but it's a trust as well that works. There's a great another book, please, Robert Axelrod. I think it's called Evolution of Cooperation, and it's a great analysis of how cooperation works in nature and how it's not exclusive to humans, and that the basis of it is that if you're in a cooperative relationship, that means you're better off than being on your own. Yes, the minute it stops being that. In other words, for anyone's being exploited, then it's going to fall apart, but it just so happens. Over the years, we understand one thing, which is human nature. Everybody is going to always overestimate their own importance and value in a given relationship, as they also underestimate everyone else's. And if you can keep that in your mind, yes, you know, it sort of tempers your ego and you just go, oh, well, that was something I did that was great, but it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for these guys. Absolutely, let's talk more about composition. Is there a particular way that it happens for you or does it happen in different ways. I think that the most important tool to good composition is recognition that you've got something really good. And the enemy of getting to something really good is not something bad, but something that's just good, yes, and something that's kind of almost it. Yes, I can really fool you and waste a lot of your time and a lot of anguish. And so I think there's been times where we're as a band are more attuned and less attuned, and so records can take longer if you're not as a tune, not because you're not writing good stuff, but the stuff you're you believe is it. You know, it turns out not to be as good as you think, So that's I would say that the most important quality is almost what you reject, and knowing to keep rejecting until you start to get to something really great. It's confounding, you know. It's because you can be waiting around. You know, you might have something that you know there's an element there that's really special, but getting to the finished song can take a long time. Do you always write with a project in mind or do you just write on a regular basis. I just write. I just write on a regular basis. And you know, early early days, I'd work with four track set machines and I'd like have drum machines and keyboards and bass guitars and guitars and try and build up tracks that way. These days it's all on the laptop. And was garage band. Now it's logic. But yeah, it's basically the same, searching for a collision of melody and chords that tells you there's something special going on here. And often I'm hearing it, you know, I'm playing some chords that I'm using and I'm hearing something Bona's doing and something that's it something great here, Now, where's this leading us? And so you're trying in a way to take that little moment of inspiration and follow it through to where it naturally wants to go. And the frustrating thing is sometimes you just can't find that way, and it can you have many full stones occasion, and then sometimes the song is there from the beginning, almost instantaneously. Would you say that in the early days it was more of a being in the room with the band playing off of each other to find it, and now it's more finding it yourself and then bringing it to the band just by the nature of everybody living in different places. Yeah, that's definitely true. But I think what happened in that earlier process of kind of being in the rehearsal room and trying to figure something out, it sort of gives you a much smaller palette of possibilities because you're kind of you can only move when you're moving as a group, and sometimes that's magical. I mean, I remember with Adam, the two of us just improvising together, and this whole song Into the Heart came together, which is on our first album. It was basically the two of us in rehearsal and just just really like in a kind of duet and me responding to things that Adam is doing on the bass and him doing the same as I would play something on the guitar you would change, and that when it works is magical. But it's it's extremely rare, and what actually happens most is, you know, you'll get some simple idea. You know that that idea will not go anywhere until somebody sits down and starts to work on a new new section. Tell me about playing with Adam, because that's a that's a real thing. Yeah, he's such a unique musician and for all of the lack of theory, he has a feel that's incredible. When he plays it always feels good. Even if the note's wrong, that's something that can be repaired or whatever, but the feeling of it, the groove of it is always cool. Yeah, always, yeah. I mean a good example of being New Year'sday. So you know, we're in rehearsal or maybe in the sound check and it suddenly starts doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doom doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. We're like, whoa, dude, that's amazing. So we kick that around for But that's it. That's all we have, you know, is his first part. So the next stage of that was me sitting with the piano and going, Okay, where's this taking us and figuring out the next part of the music. And I didn't really have melodic ideas per se, but I knew, I just knew instinctively has to go here. So that's an example of that song wouldn't exist without Adam, but it wouldn't have been a song without the compositional work that had to happen after the fact. So that's why it really works for us being a group and with Adam. As I say, with where the streets of her name, what's technically correct, it's not really here nor there? Really, Yeah, let's talk about walk On and tell me what you remember about the origination of walk On and the writing of it. In the development of that song, it's one of my very favorites. I think what started was a set of chords in an idea that I had worked up at home and brought it to the sessions and everyone thought it was really promising, so we started working on it as a band, did a couple of versions, and then we like this particular take, so we started working on it and Bono was working on melodic ideas and we kicked around for a while, but it didn't seem to come good. It just was something was not working. So I think at one point Brian said, where did these chords come from? I said, well, I worked on them at home, and he said, I think that's the problem. So I took that and I went, now, I could I could have been insulted, but in fact I just want I think he's absolutely right. I think there's a flaw in this course sequence. So I went away and worked and came back said, okay, let's try this, and it was not radically different, but it was actually a different chord progression, and the song just almost wrote itself after that, and we all got involved in sort of throwing ideas for different sections melodically. But again, once you got the log jam out of the way, it's just the thing really sort of almost wrote itself. So so lyrically, walk On, Walk On, that was a big breakthrough. That came as a result of this change of the chords, and we were at that time very inspired by the leader of the Democratic movement in mymar who had been under house arrest for a number of years, and we had just received the freedom of Dublin City, a great honor, and she had been honored at the same ceremony. Her son came along to accept on her behalf because she was in jail. So that was the first time we really became aware of her story. So that's just a great example of something that's almost good, that's almost being your enemy. And we did waste we probably wasted in hours trying to make this first version work. The other thing about it that has so much power, and I think it's different than other YouTube songs, is that it continues to unfold. It's got the home section kind of late late in the song, when it feels like the song would be ending, we have this beautiful bridge and then there's the all the all that you repeat, all that You is at the end. It really takes us on a journey. Yeah that most songs, don't, you know. Most songs are three and a half minutes or four minutes, But this one feels like it goes the extra two extra levels of taking us on this adventure. Yeah, and I think those different sections we're all attempts to solve the songwriting problem. And then we had this collection of great moments, so the real challenge is trying to sew it all together in this sort of coherent way. It was arranging and it was it was sort of a dynamic journey that we had to establish. And then the most recent version, which is on the Songs of Surrender collection, Bonno and I had done a very stripped down version of the song on an Irish TV show. We thought, well, let's try let's try walk on at this particular show. What's the minimum version we can do. It's like it came up with this acoustic part which only hints at the chords, but just enough so the melody makes sense. So then we took that and we were recording it for the Songs of Surrender project. And almost that day or a few days before, we first heard about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And Bonno had actually met President Zelenski at at an event like a couple of years before, so he had actually had a chance to get to know him a little bit, and he knew that he was before becoming a politician, had been an actor and a stand up comic. In fact, he did apparently he did a open mic session in Drahada in the late nineties, you know. So it's like we were so struck by the sense that the person standing up to this bully, Vladimir Putin and and kind of protecting the idea of democracy against the threat of a totalitarian ideology was a stand up comic, a guy who is the least likely person. So that became the basis of a new set of lyrics for a Walk On which we've put on this new collection Beautiful. I think to end, I'm going to play the new version of Every Breaking Wave, because it's a song. It's a song I've loved. I loved the original version, I love this version, and something about hearing it in its intimate form really allows it to shine. So I will play that. Thank you for that, and we will listen and thank you for doing this today. It's been an absolute pleasure, Rick, and we'll definitely we have to do this again. We will Every Breaking Way on the Shore tails the next one. There'll be one more, and every Gambler knows that's a loose is what you're really Therefore, summer hours far listeness now I speak, came to an answer phone like every father, all the breeze, winter would leave it alone. If you go, if you go your way? And I gom a wiser, always so helpless against the time. Maybe every time of the boostream knows that we're in love with the food. Are we ready at you beswift off our feet and stop chasing and breaking away? And every sale knows at the scene is a friend made enemy, and every shipwreck so knows what it is to live without into sea. I thought I had the captain's voice, but it's hard to listen while you preach, like every broken on the shore. This is as far as I could read. If you go, if you go in a coma, Are we soul always so help us against the tide? Baby ever t on the street and knows that we're in love with truth? Are we ready to the swifts off our feet and stop chasing breaking the sea knows other rocks trying his nosing. You know the hottest see place yours has been. We know that the fitter we sorely and before we pick it, before we begin if you go, if you got, are we soon? Are we shook handless against her time? Even every dog on the street knows they're wearing life? Are we read it to be? Swift? Feet can't stop you saying breaking a breaking way, re breaking? We were breaking breaking. Thanks to the Edge for catching up with Rick YouTube's new album, Songs of Surrender is out now. We can hear all of our favorite YouTube songs on our playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced with Helpful Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Naladay, and Eric Samer. Our editor is Sophie Crane. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review us on your podcast app. Our theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Rischman,

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From Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam, and Justin Richmond. The musicians you love talk a 
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