I have no compass, and I have no map

Baby Zooropa

January 4, 2016
Progress is being made on the companion to 'Songs of Innocence'

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The Edge has revealed that progress is being made on the next U2 album, and that it sounds like the band's 1993 album 'Zooropa'.

'Songs of Experience' is expected sometime in 2016, and is a companion record to 2014's 'Songs of Innocence', with the two titles combining to form the name of the Dublin act's recent world tour. 

In an interview with Q Magazine, The Edge reveals some details of the record, including that parts of it have been completed on down time in between tour dates. Bono also recently revealed that hewrote a song about the Paris attacks during the band's recent tour.

In the interview, guitarist The Edge first compared the record to Zooropa, and then said producer Brian Eno would like a similar path to the eighth album to be followed in the future. He said:

"I would love to see us making albums a bit more like that. Where we go, 'You know what? We"re not going to second-guess any of this. Let"s just go for it." I think there"s a quality you get when there"s a certain momentum to the process."

Bono, meanwhile, revealed in the same interview that the bike accident he suffered in New York around the turn of 2014/2015 has actually helped him with the record.

The frontman said "The gift of it was that I had time to write while in the mentality that you get to at the end of an album. There is a reason why all the great groups made their best albums while in and around touring, because the ideas have to come out of your head."

U2 finished their Innocence and Experience Tour with shows in Paris before Christmas, with Bonorounding off his year by busking on Dublin's Grafton Street with a host of other big-name local acts.

Zooropa: U2's "Night" Album

Ryan Leas / July 3, 2013 - 1:37 pm

For about a week before I wrote this piece, I was looking for an excuse to go for a long drive at night and listen to Zooropa. That was how I first discovered the album, on late night drives home from my high school girlfriend’s house, the blue and red glow of my dashboard and the gentler strobe of the tall highway lights passing through my window the closest approximation I could muster in small-town Pennsylvania for whatever bizarre European discotheque I thought U2 was trying to conjure. I never did get around to that drive this time, but instead listened to it during the day, a circumstance in which Zooropa makes no sense. The idea that this came out 20 years ago, and that someone would have had to walk into a record store in broad daylight on a hot summer day to purchase it, does not translate for me. Because Zooropa has always felt like U2’s night album. Zooropa is the one about diving deep, totally disappearing into something, in a manner that doesn’t work in the light of day.

Was Zooropa Really this Bad (Didn't it Win Album of the Year)?

 July 6, 2013

You know you’ve made it as a Serious Rock Band when an entire years-long phase of your career is so problematic that you spend a subsequent entire, years-long phase of your career apologizing for it. So let’s begin at the end, shall we, with U2’s apology, which we can date to a February 2002 Time magazine cover story with the headline (brace yourself) “Can Bono Save the World?” (It wasn’t a sarcastic question, by the way — this was post-9/11, and thus post-irony.)