Credit: Anton CorbijnThis year, U2 will celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree with a tour paying tribute to the classic 1987 album that gets underway May 12 in Vancouver, Canada. U2’s The Edge tells Rolling Stone that the idea for the tour coincided with the decision to delay the release of the band’s long-awaited studio album, Songs of Experience, in the wake of Donald Trump being elected U.S. president.
The Edge explains that U2 was putting the final touches on Songs of Experience, most of which had been written in early 2016, “[a]nd then the election [happened] and suddenly the world changed. We just went, ‘Hold on a second — we’ve got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what’s going on in the world.'”
The guitar great says that about the same time, he and his band mates were thinking about the upcoming anniversary of The Joshua Tree and came to the realization that with Trump’s election, the political climate had “kind of come full circle” from that of the mid ’80s.
“That record was written…during the Reagan–Thatcher era of British and U.S. politics. It was a period when there was a lot of unrest,” Edge tells Rolling Stone. “It feels like we’re right back there in a way…It just felt like, ‘Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn’t have three years ago, four years ago.'”
The Edge maintains that while doing the Joshua Tree tour, U2 will have the chance to “think about [Songs of Experience] one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say.” He adds that the band might even write some new tunes for the project.
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