The Best U2 Songs: All 234 Songs Ranked - Vulture

In 1976, a student named Larry Mullen Jr. put up a notice at Mount Temple Comprehensive School: "Drummer seeks musicians to form band." This is how the members of U2 met, a moment specifically commemorated in Bono's new memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (out November 1).

U2 are, at this point, the only rock band of their stature that still has the original lineup: No one's overdosed, no one's been fired, no one's left the group in pursuit of a solo career. Yes, they own houses in the south of France and show up in the occasional gossip column and Bono jets off to Davos every year, but they are still very much a band, and there's something remarkable in the fact that they continue to remain a going concern.

The traditional path to success in the music industry pretty much no longer exists, and if it did, a band like U2 never would have gotten the creative control they asked for — and received. No record label still in business today would have let them release a third album after the battles around the second one. And even after achieving international fame and fortune with The Joshua Tree, their fourth album, back in 1987, they came crashing back to earth with its follow-up, Rattle and Hum, which every rock critic in the world interpreted as U2 trying to teach America about American music.

By the end of the '80s, U2 could have just kept moving forward with their existing formula and maybe eked out another few years with that pattern. Record companies certainly want bands to keep doing the thing, over and over again, that made them all that money. It took tremendous foresight for U2 to take a break and a fair amount of fortitude to stand onstage and inform your audience that "… this is the end of something for U2 … We have to go away and … and dream it all up again."

In the search for that dream, Bono decided that if U2 decamped to Berlin with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, something had to happen. And it did. But for a while there, it almost didn't. Every single member of U2 was convinced at one moment or another in the early days at Hansa Studios — the same place that David Bowie, Iggy Pop and others had gone to find magic, or at least inspiration — that this was the end of U2. And then, one day, Lanois suggested to the Edge that he combine two separate guitar parts. Those guitar melodies became the start of "One" and the beginning of what would become Achtung Baby — what Bono called "the sound of four men cutting down the Joshua Tree."

U2 would come roaring back at the turn of the millennium with All That You Can't Leave Behind just at the moment when no one would've blamed any of them for sitting back on their piles of money, pursuing "side projects," and touring every couple of years behind their catalogue. Realizing that record sales were, at some point, going to stop being a primary means of income, the band struck highly profitable deals with companies like BlackBerry and Apple. That has given them the luxury to write and record at their leisure, which is what happened with Songs of Experience. The band assured everyone it would be out not long after the end of the Songs of Innocence tour at the end of 2015, but we didn't see it until two years later, and they toured The Joshua Tree again before touring Experience.

In honor of the publication of Bono's memoir, we've updated our original list to include Songs of Experience as well as a handful of other official U2 releases. What follows is a rundown of every song* U2 has released, ranked in order from worst to best.

*The ground rules: This list consists of officially released U2 songs only. This excludes covers, Bono-Edge or Larry Mullen Jr.–Adam Clayton outings (so no Spider-Man and no "Mission: Impossible," which is a cover anyway). Passengers is excluded except for "Miss Sarajevo" and "Your Blue Room." Live versions and remixes are treated as the same song and covered in that song's entry if it's relevant to its position on the list.

Thanks to/sources: U2 by U2, Niall Stokes's U2: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song, and atu2.com's lyrics and tour sections.

Not every experimental thought needs to be recorded and released, especially if you're considering it to be part two to another throwaway.

I like the idea of U2 trying to be the Talking Heads, but not all of these experimentations needed to be recorded or released. (It is fun to sing the chorus of "Psycho Killer" to it, though.)

The mechanics of "GOOYOW" have some of those absolute genius moments in the melody, but I am not ever going to forgive Bono for the misuse of the phrase "promised land" and for that entire verse about slavery where he throws in the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. He even drags poor Kendrick Lamar into this mess. It would be super great if we could just forget this song exists.

Another non-LP B-side the fans continually rally for. This is quite possibly the most overrated track in the entire U2 repertoire. I get it; it's the jam that the "Beautiful Day" riff originated from. But so what? It is otherwise flat and featureless, and nowhere near adjacent to its final form. It's a bedroom demo, a napkin sketch at best. Demoted.

This is the kind of song you write for a children's animated movie where you're playing a lion who's a retired rockstar making a comeback — something you can do when you already literally wrote songs that saved people's lives, like "Out of Control" or "Where The Streets Have No Name" or "Running to Stand Still."

They needed a B-side for "Fire." "It was done in a mad panic," the Edge notes. "It was a case of two hours to go, let's do it." It sounds like that.

This is so bad it's embarrassing, an attempt to work something out in the studio that should have been erased by the tape op. Reasonable beat, but stupid lyrics and inane title.

When U2 are a rock band, they are at their most believable, because that is who they are. It's a skin they slide into with comfort and skill. When you get a loud, crunchy squaller like this song, you want it to give you both physical and emotional catharsis. Musically it does that, but then Bono just decides to be as vague as possible lyrically. Yes, we know, America is an idea — you've been telling us this for decades — but at the time you wrote it, that idea was fraying at the seams, and this vague, declamatory word salad that just recycled one of your favorite taglines was your response? For good measure, he makes up the word refu-Jesus, which was completely unnecessary and, frankly, lazy. Drag out a megaphone and an American-flag backdrop live and maybe the people in the audience who voted Republican will forget that you're trying to make a point about refugees and the world's responsibility to them.

The title to this song is meant to be the unspoken name of God, so of course Bono wanted to have it in the chorus. The tune is vague and unsatisfying, and the lyrics are stuck in that no-man's-land between Bongolese and the actual finished lyrics. It is a terrible way to end an album.

They sound like some third-rate New Wave band trying to be relevant. This track is awful, made worse by opening side two after the graceful end on side one with "Drowning Man." Bono would comment later, "I think it's probably in the wrong key and is trying to be exciting and not quite pulling it off."

An acoustic, Beatles-esque leftover from All That You Can't Leave Behind. "Wild Honey" occupied the same general theme, although the Edge said that "Flower Child" is a song he feels is waiting for a rewrite.

If it sounds familiar, it's because it was another basic demo that got dismembered: The guitar solo is the fade-out at the end of Boy, and the rest of it got reworked into "Fire" from October. The Edge is right on with his observation that "listening back now I can't help feeling that we lost some of the power and directness of the original."

U2 took the Songs of Experience tour to India in 2019, their first time appearing in that country, and collaborated with A.R. Rahman, a musician who (among other things) likes to work in the space between eastern and western music. Ahimsa is the Sanskrit word for "nonviolence." It's a fine song and a polite gesture.

It's a pretty instrumental that originated from a bass line from Adam Clayton that Eno fed through some kind of processor. Perfectly acceptable as a B-side.

There are interesting elements in this one — bands would kill for that last minute, the Sturm und Drang, the power and lift of the melody, and the muscularity of the entire band pulling together — but it's ultimately forgettable. The best interpretation I can see is that this is a summary of what it's like to be married to Bono, and given how many songs on this and the previous record are about his wife either obliquely or blatantly (he mentions love 34 times), it's not a huge stretch. "Baby, it's a red-flag day / but baby, let's get in the water" is the kind of direct challenge to fate that you can easily imagine Paul David Hewson issuing at multiple points in his life. This could be a fascinating topic (and has been in other songs on other albums), but you are not ever going to remember this one exists unless it comes up on shuffle during a road trip.

A proto-version of Zooropa's "Numb," with familiar instrumentation, but much more traditional lyrics. "It's this quite unhinged electronic backing track with a very traditional melody and lyrics," the Edge told Rolling Stone in 2011. "It almost worked."

Proto-"Vertigo," with different lyrics about jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier. "The lyrics were about something I care deeply about," Bono told Rolling Stone in 2004, "but the song didn't vibrate. It didn't change the room temperature."

The second single released by the band, this stands head-and-shoulders above other early material because of its consistent focus, its authoritative execution. If they weren't the next big thing they were going to try their hardest to sound like it. Fake it till you make it. It worked.

It's a rough sketch from early in the recording process for the album, which the band reworked in 2009 for the record's reissue, although it is very difficult to understand why.

This outtake from No Line on the Horizon was used as the intro music for the 360° tour, and was released with the deluxe edition of Live From the Rose Bowl DVD and was made available as a stream on u2.com for about five minutes.

Bono wrote a tribute song to Berlin before he realized the entire Achtung Baby album was a tribute. The lyrics are wince-inducing, but the melody has a monochrome intensity, thanks to Edge's precise, choppy hooks that make it feel like Berlin traffic back in the day.

This is a quiet and tasteful interlude you may think is about California — because of the title and because the phrase West Coast is in the chorus and because it sounds like a beach song. Which it is, except that the beach is in the south of France, where U2 maintain houses. Also, the "West Coast" is meant to be the west coast of Syria, since "Summer of Love" is actually about refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, a thing Bono thought about a lot when he and the band were sitting on the beach. He was irked that people assumed the song was about California since he mentions Aleppo by name once. (I wouldn't even know any of the above if I hadn't read an interview with Jann Wenner in which he complained that people didn't understand the song.) There's nothing poignant or haunting or foreboding in this one — Bono gets close to going there and then backs out.

"Scarlet," the track that precedes "Is That All?" on October was a light send-off that echoed the theme of the album and closed the door on that particular period of U2. For some reason, the band decided they needed to add one more song, and one that they wrote in the studio. The lyrics are so empty they're not even worth discussing.

From the outtake pile for The Unforgettable Fire, resurrected for various B-sides and the EP. It's certainly atmospheric, and an interesting waypost on the upcoming journey to Death Valley.

More outtakes dug out of of the pile in service of filling 12-inch singles.

Another one of the missives to love and lust resulting from missing wives during the Joshua Tree sessions, it's a remembrance of youthful indiscretions in Bono's childhood home. Note the "You can't return to the place you never left" line, which would get borrowed later for "Cedarwood Road" in 2015.

An atmospheric, almost tribal instrumental that's basically a bass solo. Adam also sings lead vocals, such as they are.

It's U2's version of a Ramones song, performed live in Dublin in 1980. Succinct and delightful.

Edge characterizes this track from an early recording session for the album as, "It was a contender for a while, but never had the substance." Indeed.

Outtake from the War sessions, but the reissue states that it was originally recorded in 1982, with additional nonspecific recording in 2008. If that additional recording was meant to improve or finish the outtake … let's just say it did not help much.

During the recording of The Unforgettable Fire, the Edge discovered King Sunny Ade and juju music, a cross between Western pop and African rhythms. Juju is, at its core, a bouncy, highly danceable music form, and it definitely influenced this polished outtake from the TJT sessions. It would not have fit anywhere on the record, but it's at least a complete thought.

As you get older and start to lose relatives, and then parents, it tilts your perspective of life and how to live it in a way that you don't appreciate until you're there. The loss of Bono's father is all over HTDAAB, and here specifically. Bono was talking to Noel Gallagher, who asked if Bob Hewson believed in God. Bono said, "I don't think he knows." Noel responded, "Well, he's one step closer to knowing now." Bono: "I'm going to write that song." "It started out kind of Velvet Underground and headed off into the country," Edge said about this track, which is right, except that Bono channeled Lou Reed and not, say, Gram Parsons.

An early instrumental that sounds like it could be a coda to the Who's "Amazing Journey." Part of the set in the early (1979-80) years of the band.

This Achtung Baby outtake is a soft, delicate instrumental on piano and acoustic guitar. You can just imagine this coming together under the chandeliers in Hansa Studios' Meistersaal.

It's impossible to listen to this outtake and not envision it as U2's affectionate remake of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day." The cadence of the vocals and the ennui in the inflection, the languid pace of the instrumentation are wonderful, but the lyrics on this officially released version, while improved from the (bootleg) studio outtake, are still not strong enough, which is unfortunate.

The best thing about this song is how the rhythm section is right up front, with the kind of rib-shaking Clayton bass line he doesn't get to play much these days. There is so much U2-ness in this track, with bright Edge-ian arpeggios rippling through and a generally poppy, bubbling ambiance. It's all perfectly within their sweet spot (instead of some kind of outer influence foisting modernity upon them). That said, it doesn't break any new ground and, despite being the third song on Songs of Experience, is mostly forgettable.

Loud, noisy guitar, another song channeling the Who (this is not a bad thing). Not strong enough to make the album.

"The original lyric was much more emotional. I am not sure the best version ended up on the album," Bono said. You can see glimpses of what he's talking about in the lyrics, but otherwise, it's convoluted and ham-fisted, and the vocal delivery lacks emotion.

If your first thought when you hear this is, "Sounds like a Sgt. Pepper outtake," wait until you see the video.

Probably the most popular outtake among the U2 fan base. From the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb sessions, it was played less than a dozen times on the back half of the 360° tour. It's difficult to comprehend the rabid reaction to this particular track, except for its relative rarity. (It was leaked on the internet, probably when a CD of rough mixes was stolen from a photo shoot in France.) It is much better live, but honestly would still need a lot of work lyrically before it would be worthy of all the hype.

This track feels more like a prelude to the album than a full song; in concert (at least on the U.S. leg of the Songs of Experience tour), it was an introduction and a benediction. Bono wasn't specific about his critical health issues that became the center of Songs of Experience, but the CAT scans and other medical sounds and artifacts that became part of the live performance — and thus part of the story — made it clear that it was a life-altering event. "This is no time not to be alive" is a line that will grip you around the heart.

"I can't change the world / but I can change the world in me" is a reasonable observation, but the rest of the lyrics feel unformed; Bono has said it's meant to be the same story as "I Will Follow" with a house falling down. The title isn't accidental and also ties into the religious revival 75 percent of the band was going through at the time the album was recorded. There are graceful sweeps and arpeggios of Edge-ness from end to end, but it's not enough to give this song legs.

An ode to the many supermodels who began keeping company with U2 in the '90s. It's a sweet little love song.

The hook and bridge of "The Blackout" were some of the best moments of the Songs of Experience live show: "When the lights go out / and you throw yourself about," Bono sings as the band kicks into full tilt. Lyrically, the track is about both his brush with death as well as America's terminal condition — Bono categorizes both under "an extinction event" (which is why the opening line is about how dinosaurs are still walking the earth). Thematically, the story is just trying too hard to fit into his intention. Plus the line "Statues fall / Democracy is flat on its back, Jack / We had it all / And what we had is not coming back, Zac" is literally unforgivable for a lyricist of his caliber. That chorus, though, will have you dancing in the living room.

If U2 had given this song any other title, it would have saved them from so much abuse. It's easier to forgive this song as part of the experience of listening to the album in order. There, this fits into the abstract expressionism, the watercolors and charcoal sketches that coast you up to "Bad" and out to "MLK." But the title gives the track airs it does not possess. "A jazzman could understand that piece," Bono told Rolling Stone in 1987. No, a jazzman would ask how the hell they thought this should go on the record.

It's tricky to write popular music, especially rock and roll, that's self-referential. But when you do it right, it can work both for people who understand the connection from a previous record and for the listeners who don't know it in the moment. "13 (There Is a Light)" refers back to 2014's Songs of Innocence's "Song for Someone," and they used it to close the show every night on the tour, just like they used it to close the album. It could be overwrought, but it isn't. For U2, it's a gentle touch.

An early Joshua Tree demo that illuminates much about the band's creative process. The lyrics are literally the Introduction to William Blake's Songs of Experience.

"We don't want to be the band that talks about God," Bono said in 1980, before joining a Christian revivalist movement and writing an album with undertones of the New and Old Testaments threaded throughout the lyrics. "With a Shout" is a reasonably powerful song from an instrumental perspective, but starts to feel like Bono is yelling about glory and righteousness yet again, with really nothing new to add. "If we'd been with a different label I think they might very well have decided to drop us," manager Paul McGuinness said at the time.

If there's a less interesting premise for a song than "bored millionaires who can't finish their album go take a vacation at a luxury destination," not sure what it is.

The bonus song on the special edition of Songs of Experience should have made the cut because it is refreshingly devoid of the emotional no-man's-land it felt like some of the songs got pushed into. (That might be why.) Or maybe Bono had already expressed the same thoughts elsewhere. But it's too bad, because Mr. Hewson's voice is warm and seductive, which is a thing he doesn't often engage in.

It was originally about Bono's goddaughter (Edge's daughter), then Bono changed it up so it wasn't a song for a child, and there are some vague mumblings about maintaining innocence. It has an engaging, expansive melody, but the lyrics just do not hold up to scrutiny, and the synthetic strings are cringeworthy.

Another Adam Clayton in-studio improvisation that the Edge joined in on, except this time Brian Eno had tape rolling, so what you hear is what they did in the studio, no overdubs, no multiple takes. It fits, slightly eerie and plaintive, and provides a necessary pause for the listener before the next track, back when records had deliberate sequences that informed most people's experience of the album.

This song was "written to order for Martin Scorsese," Bono said. So it's surprising that what U2 delivered for this film in particular was a bland, uninspiring soundscape.

This is the best of classic, grown-up Bono being honest with himself — a little sarcastic, talking about married life and married love. It's one of the rare times U2 lets themselves be local (the term landlady in the U.K. isn't simply about owning land; it's also the term used for a woman who runs a public house — less owner than proprietor). "When the doorbell rings / you tell me I have a key" echoes back to the stories Bono has told over the years of coming home after a tour and being sent away because he hasn't come down from all of it yet. The landlady is Ali; the landlady is the divine feminine; the landlady is God.

"God Part II" is meant as a direct a response to the 1988 Albert Goldman bio of John Lennon, following his then-shocking Elvis biography in the early '80s. Not all windmills need to be tilted at, and a line like: "I don't believe that rock'n'roll / Can really change the world" seemed pretty misplaced.

Written upon request for a theatrical production of A Clockwork Orange, the director was advised by Edge that while he might want a hit musical, "We warned him we weren't very good with hits." On the other hand, if you view this Berlin gothic-pop instrumental through the lens it was created for, it fits pretty damn well. It ended up as the B-side to "The Fly," a good home for it.

The melody is ancient; Daniel Lanois was digging into 12th- and 15th-century hymns — as one does, if you're Daniel Lanois — but when it came time for lyrics, Bono and the band were able to craft a story that could be modern or extremely old. The concept revolved around a soldier in Afghanistan, but the lyrics could have come from one of those hymns. There are also some uncharacteristic '60s-influenced harmonies.

Melodically and structurally, this is a fantastic song; it's Bono riffing on "Bono," his image and persona, and his particularly chaotic and occasionally ham-fisted approach to being the lead singer of a rock-and-roll band. It's almost a little too self-deprecating: "Singers cry about everything." YES, WE KNOW.

This outtake, released on the Early Demos project, has had a legendary reputation among fans as one of the holy-grail outtakes — one of those should've-been-released-whatever-were-they-thinking kind of things. The truth is that "Street Mission" is absolutely vital and important to the band's history, but that doesn't mean it is a very good song. It is loud and brash and shouty and ever so earnest, and you just want to pinch its freshly scrubbed, rosy-pink, punk-rock cheeks.

U2 does not need to write a song in tribute to Joe Strummer; they already did that, with "Out of Control" or "11 O'Clock Tick Tock," or even "Street Mission." "This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now" is well-intentioned but completely devoid of the impact and excitement of hearing the Clash for the first time. (No one can write a good song about the Clash, to be fair.)

This is haunting and evocative, and the Edge's solo will break your heart in two. Definitely one of their best songs of the last 20 years. Salman Rushdie gets a co-writing credit because Bono copped a line straight from Rushdie's novel of the same name (he was very chuffed about it).

It would be a reasonable assumption to think that a song called "The Troubles" on a U2 record would be about the conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century, except that it is not. It's an interesting sonic experiment with Lykke Li on guest vocals, but oddly dispassionate.

This is a perfectly serviceable pop tune, but you kind of have to side with Larry Mullen, who said, "It's a playful side to U2 you rarely get to see. But it wasn't one of my favorites."

Another demo that didn't make the album. In the liner notes, Edge writes, "It seemed at the time to be a color already well-represented, so we never got around to developing it beyond this point."

A reject from No Line on the Horizon that was reworked to play over the closing credits of a friend's film. Eno was not pleased. "Tell them they're being stupid cunts," he joked to a journalist after playing him the song. It's ambient and delicate, the kind of thing that you want playing as people are walking out of the movie theater.

It's a sweet, little, surf-guitar-flavored instrumental, which showed up as the B-side of the "A Day Without Me" single.

More detritus from All That You Can't Leave Behind, with bits that ended up over in "Miracle Drug." In the liner notes, the Edge writes that "Levitate" is one of the songs that "just don't fit in."

The Edge described "Smile" as one of those songs that "just arrived too late." It's definitely not finished in this state, but it probably should be. There are elements of love and faith, and the music is compelling.

Bouncy, joyous, full of vim and vigor. It's not going to burn the world down, but the tune is memorable, and the melody line is bulletproof. Manager Paul McGuinness was so fond of it that he wanted to release it as a single; the Edge offers, "It was very melodic, but not really very good." It is definitely an antidote to the A-side, "New Years Day."

"There were a couple of U2 songs there, and a couple that might have become U2 songs, but they were the kind of atmospheric, mid-tempo pieces that we come up with quite easily," said Adam Clayton, which exactly characterizes this track.

An oblique, yet direct condemnation of the various abuses committed by the Church in Ireland over the years. "Secrets can make you sick," Bono writes in the liner notes. The melody here is controlled but unsettling, with a guitar solo that sounds like an SOS.

"That's really the wild card on the album," the Edge said in 2006. He's not wrong, and it's not a bad song — it is actually a fascinating, unexpected melody, but it's kind of an abrupt pause on this particular record.

Bono sort of vaguely says, "Yeah, maybe it's about my wife," but there's no overarching theme or melody here to make this one memorable.

This is the sleeper on Songs of Experience, the one they never quite figured out what its ultimate form should be. It came out a handful of times on the Joshua Tree 2017 tour as an acoustic final encore out on the B-stage; even in its broken-down, embryonic form, people did not run for the exits. The song's production on the album does its best to obscure its good bones, but Bono stretches his voice to the melodic edges, where it sounds its best, and the Edge keeps swooping in with the kinds of ascending and descending lines that are pretty much trademark — especially in the last minute, when the melody and emotion key right in alongside Bono. But I'd still rather have the broke-down version, because that's where the interesting things happen.

The most believable account of what this song is actually about is Bono mentioning something about Amsterdam and the red-light district, which would be understandably mind-blowing to a bunch of kids from still-sexually-conservative Ireland. The trumpet is courtesy of Kenny Fradley of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, who just happened to be in town. It's not a terrible song, but it's not a great one either. Points for trying to do something different with it.

You know how in How the Grinch Stole Christmas there's that scene in which you see an X-ray of the Grinch's heart and it grows so large it breaks the frame? This is what this song will do to you. It is a full-scale European-football-stadium-size anthem, and it will echo in your head for days. And while it's kind of dumb to think, I wish the Edge played piano more — because, you know, he's a uniquely singular rock guitar genius — his keyboard work on "Love Is Bigger" may make you say just that.

Rescued from the cutting floor at Hansa Studios, this unnecessarily elevated demo somehow made it to the B-side of the "Even Better Than the Real Thing" single instead of any of the many far-superior tracks that didn't make the final cut for Achtung Baby. There's a nice, crunchy guitar break at the end and a vague Beatles-esque flavor, but it's ultimately forgettable.

"Hey, how about we end the record with another hymn, like we always do?"

Lights of home: thinking about what it must have felt like to drive back into Dublin in the early days of being on the road. Lights of home: thinking about how it felt to see the lights of Ireland flying back into the country. Lights of home: what it's like to wake up in the hospital after being unconscious — which Bono makes clear with his choice of opening line, "I shouldn't be here 'cause I should be dead." It's a tribute to U2's songwriting skills that this song feels like all of the above: like absence and longing and missing something you didn't know you missed until you got it back and your heart is whole again. Also, dude can write a chorus — a loud and irresistibly singable one that's meant for a stadium full of people to shout at the top of their lungs. Combine all of that with a heart-stabbingly plaintive guitar solo from the Edge on the bridge and you'll pull your phone out and turn on the flash and wave it above your head even if you're just sitting at home.

"After grief comes rage," Bono writes in the album liner notes for this track. But there's a reasonable amount of self-deprecation in the lyrics — "Do you live here or is this a vacation?" — and the melody is more upbeat than you'd expect for this subject matter.

When Boy came out, this was the track where you thought, "Hey, someone has been listening to Tom Verlaine." That's hardly a diss — it's not like bands doing that were exactly thick on the ground — and the Edge's ability to translate what he heard and make it his own is one of the hallmarks of U2. Bono deserves some credit for the purchase of the Memory Man echo unit that creates the soaring arpeggios on this track and "11 O'Clock Tick Tock."

A Mr. David Bowie would like a word, gentlemen. That said, the song is actually about traveling to Berlin on tour, and is one of the album's more genuinely interesting and engaging compositions.

You can hear the rumblings of The Joshua Tree in the urgency and vibrancy of this track; Bono states that it's about New York City, and far be it for me to tell him otherwise, but this song sounds like the elements invoked: light, wind, earth, air. It's a good transition after "Bad," but otherwise sounds more like a demo than a finished track.

The last track on Boy, this was a parting gesture — a multi-textured, harmonic send-off meant to depict the band's suburban Dublin stomping grounds: The "shadows and tall trees" are meant to be the electric poles strung throughout the streets, the lyrics a reference to Lord of the Flies.

One of several songs Bono would end up writing about heroin, and specifically, the heroin problem in Dublin, as well as his own guilt — or rather, what's always seemed like a cautious acknowledgment that if he had not been the person he was, he might have gone down that path, out of curiosity or boredom or comradeship. The music doesn't quite match the lyrics...