Song of the Day: U2 – With or Without You

With Or Without You has a lot of ‘yearn’ in it. What I get from it is you’re ready to accept but you’re ready to leave something behind, much like life itself. Something comes your way but there’s a sacrifice and you have to leave something else behind.

Daniel Lanois

The first big hit off Joshua Tree, which immediately became one of popular music’s most massive zeitgeist albums upon its release in 1987, of a piece with Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, Tapestry, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Rumours, Thriller, Born in the USA, Jagged Little Pill, and I don’t know, whatever it is that fills the niche these days, something by Taylor Swift, I suppose. It was everywhere, as was With or Without You, a powerful, moodily ambient crie de coeur about the sometimes perfect overlap between pain and love, inspired by lead singer Bono’s contemporary marriage woes, which featured a fascinating construction that was on the one hand about as conventional as could be, and on the other refreshingly unusual.

On the conventional side is the chord structure, which is bog-standard, with a twist. With or Without You is built around what may be the most frequently used chord progression in all of popular music, instantly recognizable to anybody who isn’t tone-deaf, and referred to by those with training in musical theory as I-V-vi-IV. For some reason surpassing understanding, the human mind seems wired to respond immediately to those chords, as if they mimic some sound in nature, invariably heralding good things, that our auditory circuits have been naturally selected to favour. It’s the backbone of all sorts of songs, from rockers like the Rolling Stones’ Beast of Burden and Green Day’s When I Come Around to sublime ballads like Neil Finn’s Fall at Your Feet, and McCartney’s Let it Be. If you’re a fan of Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, you know these chords in your bones; no matter the arrangement, rhythm, tempo, or key, they just work. They’re magical. The comedic pop combo Axis of Awesome lays it out in this celebrated clip:

Hard to believe that the same essential musical structure, with some variations, supports songs as diverse as No Woman No Cry, Forever Young, Take On Me, Country Roads, If I Was a Boy, Don’t Stop Believing, Poker Face, One of Us, and Torn, not to mention fitting Auld Lang Syne and Waltzing Matilda like a glove, but there you have it. There’s a Wikipedia article if you’re keen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%E2%80%93V%E2%80%93vi%E2%80%93IV_progression

The clever bit with U2’s iteration is that the song is structured around those chords, yet they aren’t actually played, but instead only implied by the single leading notes of Adam Clayton’s simple yet mesmerizingly captivating bass line, which repeats the root note of each chord eight times in succession:

So basic, yet so effective; there’s something both soothing and immersive about that bass line, isn’t there? It’s like you’re floating in the womb, listening to your mother’s heartbeat.

What’s decidedly unconventional is the verse structure, which, just like prior song of the day Thunder Road, forgoes any chorus or bridge, and simply builds, one verse atop another, until reaching an emotional climax, as noted by famed Joshua Tree producer Daniel Lanois: “It has tension and builds like one of those great Roy Orbison songs, where every section is unique and never repeats. I like that kind of sophistication”.

The scintillating guitar part from David Evans, A.K.A. The Edge, arguably supplies even more drama than Paul Hewson’s, er, Bono’s rousing vocal, and was the product of a novel modification of the electric guitar concocted by one Michael Brook, through which the ability to sustain notes more or less indefinitely is provided by an electronic circuit that takes the signal from the standard guitar pickup, then amplifies it and feeds it back into a separate pickup coil, as will make perfect sense to anybody who understands these things better than I do. Said Lanois:

We had a little secret weapon. It was called the ‘infinite sustain guitar,’ invented by my good friend Michael Brook, a Canadian associate. Michael had invented this instrument where you didn’t have to use your right hand on the guitar. You just held a note with your left hand, and he had a little self-looping system built into the instrument. But as you went up higher on the guitar, the infinite sustain just kept going into the stratosphere.

Brook’s thus-named Infinite Guitar made sounds unlike anything anybody’d ever heard, but it quite literally wasn’t for the faint of heart – it turned a basic Stratocaster into a potentially death-dealing, jury-rigged sort of contraption apt to administer severe electric shocks unless handled with the utmost caution, as U2’s stage hands were soon none too happy to discover. “It would have failed even the most basic of safety inspections” said The Edge, but the device, which he described as essentially a guitar that played itself, created endless, looping notes that were at once piercing yet ethereal, perfect for the piece’s theme of anguished longing. Advance this clip to the 1:45 mark, and try to imagine the song minus that chiming, keening, soaring, emotionally aching guitar line, echoing across the sound stage as if being played within a Gothic cathedral:

As described by Lanois, The Edge’s ability to wring the perfect sounds out of the Infinite Guitar was almost instinctual. It took him only two takes to lay it all down, the tapes of which Lanois fused to form the final track on the recording.

Believe it or not, the band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, was initially opposed to the release of With or Without You as the lead single from Joshua Tree. He didn’t think it sounded right for radio, perhaps owing to its deviation from the standard verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus model of most popular songs, besides which it was about pain, ambivalence, and moral crisis, with a couple of religious overtones thrown in just to add to the discomfort, and who wanted to hear that in the middle of the afternoon? Who wants such stuff coming out of the dashboard radio while idling, frustrated, in rush-hour traffic? People crave danceable toons, not spiritual agony, right? They want Peter Pick-Me-Up, not Debby Downer, much less the sincerely long-suffering, self-excoriating, on-the-cusp-of-an-emotional-breakdown Harry Hairshirt.

Well that’s right, except not this time. Buoyed by an unusually artful video, With or Without You shot straight to #1 all over the world, and turned U2 from a band with a solid following into a stadium-filling juggernaut, with few rivals in the pop pantheon. They hadn’t just arrived, they’d reached an altitude at which they could even emulate the Beatles, and snarl up traffic in a major city by holding an impromptu concert from a rooftop, as depicted in the excellent Rattle and Hum, the documentary that captured U2 at its spectacular zenith during their tour following Joshua Tree‘s release. For anybody else, at any other moment, this attempted assumption of the Fab Four’s mantle would have seemed hubristic, even vaguely offensive, but these guys could get away with it. They’d demonstrated the chops, and earned the mystique. Watch this, and tell me they didn’t pull it off: