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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.

Bono sings in "Sometimes You Can't Make it On Your Own" of his father's death in 2001 and his subsequent struggle to come to terms with missing a man he couldn't get close to. Brendan "Bob" Hewson's death, Bono has said, placed an atomic bomb in his life he wasn't ready to deal with. "Miracle Drug" pays tribute to a paraplegic school mate of the band's who, with the care of his mother and the help of a drug, was able to peck poems out on a keyboard with a stick attached to his forehead. "I want to trip inside your head/Spend the day there/To hear the things you haven't said/And see what you might see" the song begins. Credit must be given to Bono for giving poignancy to what might be the most preposterous simile in music: "Freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head."

It doesn't take long for this song, as with most of them, to yield their metaphors to more direct lines on love and its power to keep a man and a woman together ("A Man and A Woman"), make armies lay down their arms ("Love And Peace or Else"), and heal the world's wounds ("Crumbs From Your Table"). "All Because of You" praises love's power to sustain a person and make them whole again. The Edge lets himself go a little wild on this one, as he does on "Vertigo" and "City of Blinding Lights," their tribute to both New York and a loved one.

"Original of The Species" is written for Bono's goddaughter—The Edge's eldest daughter—imploring her to "Please stay a child somewhere in your heart" but to also "Come on now, show your soul/You've been keeping your love under control." And the last song of the album is "Yahweh", an eloquent, beautiful tribute to you know who.

Too bad a song called "Mercy" with lines such as "Love's got to be with the weak/Only then love gets a chance to speak" and "Love is the end of history/The enemy of misery" was cut at the last minute from the album. At over six minutes, it breaks the rule for a pop tune. But it is available through other means and its lyrics are included in a hard-back book that accompanies a deluxe edition of the album.

Another song also not on the album, but available on the deluxe edition, is "Fast Cars." As a sort of cousin to "Vertigo", it's a song hinting at the unfulfilling pleasures we can so easily have when what we need is something tougher to come by but permanently more satisfying. It features a surprising Spanish-style guitar and rhythm section and is the song with the lyric about dismantling an atomic bomb.

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November (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48