U2 are re-doing U2 for a recently announced album, titled Songs Of Surrender. The compilation will see 40 of the iconic Irish rock band’s songs get “a 21st-century reimagining.”
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The news of new music was first teased when fans began receiving handwritten letters from the band’s guitarist The Edge. “When a song becomes well known, it’s always associated with a particular voice,” he wrote in the note. “I can’t imagine ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ without the reedy timbre of Bob Dylan or ‘All The Time In The World’ without the unique voice of Louis Armstrong.”
The Edge went on to detail how the same can be said for the voice of U2’s frontman, Bono. “So what happens when a voice develops and experience and maturity give it additional resonance?” The Edge asked.
See the letter below.
“The fact is that most of our work was written and recorded when we were a bunch of very young men,” he wrote. “Those songs mean something quite different to us now. Some have grown with us. Some we have outgrown, but we have not lost sight of what propelled us to write those songs in the first place.
“The essence of those songs is still in us. But how to reconnect with that essence when we have moved on and grown so much?”
What began “as an experiment,” the guitarist explained, rather became an “obsession as so many early U2 songs yielded to a new interpretation.”
The goal was to give their classic songs a dose of modernity, The Edge explained. “Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version, each song started to open up to a new authentic voice of this time, of the people we are now, and particularly the singer that Bono has become.
“I hope you like our new direction,” he closed.
On Tuesday, Jan. 10, U2 officially confirmed the career-spanning album with a social media post. Accompanied by a teaser reel soundtracked by a refreshed version of “Beautiful Day,” the post was simply captioned, “Songs Of Surrender. 40 Songs. Reimagined and rerecorded” alongside the release date.
Songs Of Surrender is set to drop on March 17.
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