u2ingly yours.
Original Of The Species is a very special song for me, it’s a beautiful, melodic journey. Most songs go A B A B C D. Pop songs and rock and roll songs are very simple structures, but that melody keeps changing, A B C D, A B C D, I think is the way it goes, and it’s about seeing some people who are ashamed of their bodies, in particular teenagers with eating disorders, not feeling comfortable with themselves and their sexuality. I’m just saying to them, you are one of a kind, you are the first one of your kind, you’re an original of the species … “You feel like no one before, you steal right under my door, I kneel ’cause I want you some more, I want the lot of what you’ve got, and I want nothing that you’re not, everywhere you go you shout it, you don’t have to be shy about it”. So it’s a “be who you are”, and I can’t wait to play it live. Edge plays some extraordinary piano which got the complexity to the verses, to balance that anthem.
[bono]
I don’t remember the band being in such good form since perhaps The Joshua Tree. I remember when we finished The Joshua Tree, we thought it wasn’t great but we knew it was special, we just weren’t sure if it was great, but we were in this mood we’re in now. People feel very good about it. If the record disappears down the toilet, never registers on the charts and people say U2 have had their time, they can fuck off now, we still know we’ve made a great record and we’re feeling very good about each other, because we’re rough on each other, we kick the shit out of each other, pushing each other to be great, because in the end you can’t live like we live. We’re living it large, we’ve got great places, houses, we don’t have the worries a lot of people have. The one part of the deal we can’t blow is being crap, and I think we’ve kept our end of the deal.
[bono]
Yahweh was one of those songs that had an emotional weight to it. Bono’s first vocal to it was this incredible thing, and I think most of the melodies that ended up on the final version were written in a matter of minutes when he first heard the piece of music. Quite quickly after that, he came up with this idea of calling it Yahweh, which is the name for the most high, which Jewish people do not utter, it’s written but not spoken. I don’t know the exact translation, but it’s a sacred name for God, and in this song it’s a prayer. I can’t really explain it beyond that, it’s one of those songs that had to be written, and again we just got out of the way.
[edge]
