Bono Talks New U2 Albumsssss

Tweet There has been so much tak about U2's new music, sparked by the new songs they are playing on the tour this year. So much has been said, and so much has been rumored. Today I found this on  Rolling Stone. This is a snippet of the much larger article, which you can find by clicking here. 

Credit to David Fricke. 

The Next Album – or Albums

The tour is now less about the last album and more about your continuing history – the songs you played in Turin from deep in your catalog; the new material. That in-the-round spectacle has become more fluid, allowing you to do something more than amaze.

The idea was to make the crowd the spectacle – for us to be in the middle of this community and be able to play a new song if we want. People actually see it happening, because there is nothing else on stage. You can't hide.

So now is the throwdown: "Oh, really? Let's see you play some new songs. How about three?" Sure, people can say, ""Oh, I didn't think that was any good." But if I was a U2 fan, that's what I would want. I would want to watch a new song develop. We may discover it's not what we thought it was, and it may never see the light of day. But we've got a lot more songs to play.

How many?

We have Songs of Ascent, which is the meditative work that was meant to complement No Line on the Horizon. We've got a rock album. We also have a club-sounding album. And then we have the Spider-Man [musical] stuff.

Across those four, there are 25-30 songs. Now we have to decide how we go about releasing them? Do we release them in their groups? Chris Martin [of Coldplay] called me and said, "I hear you've got all these albums going. I have a great idea. Why not just pick the best songs from all of them and put them out now?" And I'm like, "Hmm . . . " [Strokes his chin]. 


Because we don't think like that. It's a bit mad. In that sense, we're not as 21st Century as we think we are, because we'd be putting out more new songs online, involving our audience in the choice – if we were really modern. We're just sitting here arguing about them, except no one else knows about them. The people on the beach here probably know them, because we keep playing them, like we did last night [smiles].

How much do you see the show changing when you come back to North America next summer, to play the rescheduled shows?

That's going to be great. We'll maybe have a new album – I think we probably will. So it's kind of wonderful. Those people are going to have tickets to a whole new show with new songs. It's going to be very exciting next year.