Today is not just my mom's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!!), it's also the release date of U2's eleventh album entitled, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (listen to the album online at www.U2.com). Unfortunately it won't be coming to Nicaragua for several more weeks so I have to be patient. In the meantime, the Irish rockers are making the rounds and even shot a video on the streets of Manhattan yesterday capped off with a free concert in Brooklyn. In an excellent interview with the New York Times last week Bono had this to say:
"There's cathedrals and the alleyway in our music. I think the alleyway is usually on the way to the cathedral, where you can hear your own footsteps and you're slightly nervous and looking over your shoulder and wondering if there's somebody following you. And then you get there and you realize there was somebody following you: It's God."
From Christianity Today's feature about the new album called "Pop Love for a War-Torn World":
"U2's message hasn't changed over the 28 years they've been together. It's elementary: Love. It has been an answer and an admonition running through their every album, their every tour. "Do you know how to dismantle an atomic bomb?" Bono reportedly asked Michael W. Smith earlier this year. "With love," Bono said. "With love." They leave the listener at a place where the streets have no name.
Bono and The Edge describe the album's running order as taking the listener from a place of fear, confusion, and dizzying temptations to a place where hope, peace, and love reign supreme. The first track, "Vertigo," is a bombs-away, fast-paced confessional from someone who sounds like they got more than they bargained for. The remaining songs wind their way through personal fears of death, loss, and distance from others, to global fears of wars and apathy toward the weak, the sick, and the forgotten.
As a concept, love is a little hard to grasp. Give
it a body, a mind, a voice, or an action and we can know it more
easily. U2 has done that, by drawing upon some very personal
experiences for song material. On a surprising number of songs, that
stirring U2 chemistry is at work. Bono's voice swells into, and
through, the chorus while The Edge picks his way around Bono's
full-bodied passion with the simplest notes."
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