Credit: Anton CorbijnU2 put its long-in-the-works studio album Songs of Experience on hold to mount a world tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of its classic 1987 album The Joshua Tree, but bassist Adam Clayton maintains the record will finally get its release once the band wraps up the trek.
“We’re pretty much done on it,” Clayton told members of the media Monday night in New York City on the red carpet of the MusiCares gala at which he was honored with the Stevie Ray Vaughan Award. “We just want to get this tour out of the way and then we’ll figure out what we’re gonna do.”
The Irish rockers launched The Joshua Tree Tour 2017 last month, and will finish its initial North American leg this Saturday, July 1, in Cleveland. The trek will continue with a series of summer concerts in the U.K., Ireland and mainland Europe, which will be followed by more U.S. shows in September and a tour of Mexico and South America in October.
In a recent interview with Variety, Clayton explained that a factor in U2’s decision to delay Songs of Experience‘s release was the election of Donald Trump.
“Once the election had happened we didn’t want to put out a record without having some time to evaluate what was going on and what was behind the outcome,” he maintained. “[S]o we did say, ‘Let’s reexamine where we are,’ and we did reexamine and I think it’s been better for the record.”
He added, that the new album actually “has been ready to go for a while, because it didn’t require a lot of surgery, so to speak — it was a little bit of cosmetic surgery.”
U2’s tour continues tonight with a concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
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