U2 Dissects "Bomb"

There are two routes for you. There is your relationship with your audience. But that can go on, and the rest of the world not know. And that's OK when you're in a band. It's not OK if you're a songwriter. Because every songwriter wants their song to belong to people other than their audience.

It's like you want your kid to do the best he can. You want your songs to go all the way. And if you can't get them on the radio, you want other people to sing them on the radio. "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" — that's not so easy to get through, because it comes from such a different world than everything else on the radio now. It sounds like it's from the Fifties.

Is the pop success of that song particularly important for you, because you wrote it about your late father?
I hadn't thought of it in that light. But as a song, I want to hear it sung poorly in a bar [laughs]. I really do. I want to cringe as the cheesy piano player in the blue tuxedo grins, as you walk across to order your vermouth. [Affects Bill Murray-style lounge-lizard voice] "Someti-i-i-i-mes you can't make it..."

I noticed that on Saturday Night Live and at the free Brooklyn show, you sang a couple of extra lines at the end, from "No Regrets" by the folksinger Tom Rush. It's a wonderful song, but I was surprised that you knew it.
"I don't want you back/We'd only cry again/Say goodbye again": That song came to me through a version by Scott Walker. I'm a big fan. You can hear that in our music — "City of Blinding Lights," that painterly side of the lyrics, that kind of melodrama. But that just came into my head on Saturday Night Live. It was the first time I did it. It went through my head, and I sang it.

Yet in making "Atomic Bomb," you recorded a number of the songs more than once — with producer Chris Thomas, then Steve Lillywhite — and dropped several that you had nearly completed. You wrote three different sets of lyrics for "Vertigo" alone. Why is it sometimes so hard to come up with something that, at other times, comes to you so naturally?
Because you look everywhere else, don't you? There's a certain hit you want to get off a song, and we weren't getting it from the material. It happens. And that's the problem. We're addicted to that feeling. We could have had an album out [earlier], and it would have been pretty damn good. You would have really liked it, because it was a rock & roll album. But we have to sing these songs for the rest of our lives, and they have to work on so many levels. Two years — it's a song a month. There are twenty-four songs that came out of the sessions. Eleven of them are on the album.