Sometimes when I have a day that allows me to listen to a lot of music, I’ll focus in on one specific artist. If it’s an artist with a lot of material in my library, it can take the better part of a day to really sink my ears into the music and enjoy it. It’s almost always a rewarding experience, because it does so much to remind me about music I once loved but may have lost a connection with over the years as new music has come along to take its place. (Of course there are also inevitable days that leave me wondering what the hell I was thinking when I was into that artist so heavily.) Today turned out to be one of those days good memory days, even though I made the criteria a little more specific than usual: Today I’ve been listening to nothing but music from U2 produced between 1980 and 1989.
Narrowing down to just the 80s goes back to a lot of the stuff they did when they were more garage band than corporation. Not that they didn’t achieve ridiculous levels of success in the 80s -- I think even the most casual music fan could probably listen to their albums chronologically and pinpoint the moment they became one of the biggest millionaire bands of the world. But that’s always been one of the things I’ve liked about this band the most: Even though they have a distinct sound overall, each album is different than the others.
To celebrate what I’ve declared to be National 80s U2 Day (at least in my house), here are my top 10 U2 songs from the 1980s. I have to preface this list by saying it was not at all easy to make and would have been even more challenging if I hadn’t narrowed it down to a single decade. So here’s how it turned out. As always, in no particular order:
Bullet the Blue Sky: A battle cry for peace if there ever was one, with one of my all-time favorite drum riffs and guitars that sound like heavy machinery.
Gloria: Back in sub-suburban Minnesota of the early 1980s, finding U2’s “October” album in a pre-Amazon mall record store or hearing anything from it on forever-homogenous Twin Cities’ radio would have been like finding the Holy Grail filled with Leprechaun gold and Skittles. I was completely taken with the urgency of this song the few times I was lucky enough to come across it on MTV, and played through it repeatedly the day I finally bought the album (on cassette).
Where the Streets Have No Name: "The Joshua Tree" was the big album in the dorms back in the spring of 1987. One of the guys that lived in the room in the southwest corner of my floor bought it right away. Theses guys had HUGE speakers in their room, so when they played their music loud it filled the halls in two directions at once, and this was their favorite song off that album. Too often dorm guys with big speakers play crap music (of which there was no shortage in 1987), but this was one of the few times I could get behind it. Hearing that resonating swell that defines the first minute coming at you so loud and so constant was epiphanal.
Running to Stand Still: Looking at the other songs that made this list, and extending beyond the music U2 offered in just the 1980s, I think it’s safe to call this my favorite U2 song. When I first heard it I just took it at face value as a beautifully understated song with painful lyrics. Learning it was about drug abuse gave it an added layer of tragedy I hadn't considered, but didn’t take it too emotionally far from what it had come to mean to me personally.
All I Want is You: One of my favorite love songs of all time, but only if the entire six-and-a-half minutes are played, and the brilliant, storm-warning guitar solo that fades into a coda of strings at the end hasn’t been truncated down to a more radio-friendly version.
Hawkmoon 269: Another of my favorite songs, period. This was the kind of anthemic song U2 produced so much in the 80s that it eventually became somewhat of a caricature of their over-earnest, bombastic “Joshua Tree” sound. But no matter how their sound has changed over the decades, this one continues to resonate with me like few others, to the degree that I included it on the master playlist I’m using for my FOLLOWING INFINITY revision soundtrack this summer.
Bad: I woke up with this song in my head this morning, out of nowhere. It was what inspired National 80s U2 Day. Both the original version found on “The Unforgettable Fire” and the live version from “Wide Awake in America” are beautiful and heartbreaking.
Sunday Bloody Sunday (Live): Waiting to for the chance to see the Live at Red Rocks video for this song was one of the reasons we 80s kids would stare hopefully at MTV for hours at a time.
Christmas (Baby Please Come Home): This appeared on the first “A Very Special Christmas” album in the winter of 1987. This song is so strongly imprinted on my idea of December at St. Cloud State I can barely imagine one without the other. So, so many years later it still remains one of my favorite contemporary Christmas songs, even surpassing the original version.
New Year’s Day: My U2 gateway song. You never forget your first.
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