It sounds like U2’s 2015 tour supporting LP Songs of Innocence from the previous year sparked the Irish rockers’ creative juices.
U2 lead guitarist The Edge has revealed that the group is finishing up Songs of Experience, due later this year, and that it was recorded in between legs of the group’s Innocence + Experience tour. Further, he compared the recording process to how U2 made 1993’s Zooropa in a new interview with Q Magazine (via DIY). Zooropa, the follow up to 1991’s Achtung Baby, featured some electronic elements and was considered one of the group’s more experimental albums.
Lead singer Bono wrote Songs of Experience, the companion record to Songs of Innocence, while rehabbing from his 2014 bike accident. “The gift of it was that I had time to write while in the mentality that you get to at the end of an album,” said the Irishman to Q. “There is a reason why all the great groups made their best albums while in and around touring, because the ideas have to come out of your head.”
And it sounds like producer Brian Eno is happy with how the recording of the anticipated record went. “[He] would love to see us making albums a bit more like that,” The Edge told Q. “Where we go, ‘You know what? We’re not going to second-guess any of this. Let’s just go for it.’ I think there’s a quality you get when there’s a certain momentum to the process.”
Songs of Experience, named after the 1789 William Blake poetry compilation Songs of Innocence and of Experience, will have about a dozen songs according to Entertainment Weekly. Bono has also revealed that one of the record’s tracks, potentially titled Tightrope, is “very epic.”
