U2 Online

BE: I think they were very keen on the Talking Heads stuff that I had done. I think they also, dare I say it, liked some of my music! [laughs] The main thing, actually, was that they wanted to go somewhere else.

DL: They wanted to do something different. U2 has been listening to New Gold Dream by Simple Minds as a point of reference, a record they liked. The panorama of the ambiance appealed to them. I think that Bono wanted to get to a place that was wider than stripped-down rock’n'roll, so we allowed ourselves the flexibility to embrace the colors that Eno and I had been developing.

BE: I had this phone call with Bono– he is the greatest salesman of all time, you have to bear that in mind– where I said to him, look, what I’m worried about is that I might change things rather unrecognizably. People might not particularly like the new you that comes out of this. And he said, well, actually we want to be changed unrecognizably. We don’t want to just keep repeating what we’ve done before. He said if we wanted to, we’re on track for being a band that just does the kind of records we’ve done so far. He said we want to do something different from that. He said we wanted to be more– I forget the word he used, but “cutting edge” was the meaning. I thought, OK, as long as you appreciate that there’s a risk involved in that.

After that conversation was when I came up with a plan. I thought, well, I knew that Danny was a great producer, and even if nothing about the working relationship between me and the band worked out, they would still have a really good producer in him. In fact, it worked out very well.

DL: The entire record has soft edges, but I suppose it can be viewed as…when you see great photographic images printed from film, the raw edges surrounding the portrait are part of the beauty. The medium presents itself, and therefore the restrictions become part of the dedicated work. I still love that about restrictions. I think we did the best we could with what we had to work with. We had very few tools, and there were no outside influences. We were huddled up as a team, and we got what we got because of what we brought to the table. Part of me likes a more ragged, jagged guitar sound or performance, but our work might not have been as innovative had we followed in the footsteps of what came before. We were very proud of what we had hit on.

Pitchfork: Daniel, you’re more of a traditional musician than Brian is, and you obviously bring something different than he does to the albums you work on.

DL: We are similar in the sense that we love soul music, using “soul” as a broad banner for anything that feels right, that has a sense of purpose to it. That’s ultimately what we love in records, as a human race. We want to be lifted. But Eno’s an incredible catalyst, and has a way of quickly presenting another way of looking at things. That’s really his genius, and he’s still the best at it. Of course, he might spontaneously come up with a fresh way to look at things, but when the shop door closes, Lanois is still sweeping up!

Posted by Joshua Klein on October 23, 2009 at 5:40 p.m.