The Joshua Tree is the fifth studio album for Irish rock band U2. Bruce Springsteen inducted Bono, Adam Clayton, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr. into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, which recognizes the band’s switch from a Post Punk sound to a distinctly pop sound recognized in this 1987 album.
(The 1987 cover of The Joshua Tree album by the band U2).
Where the Streets Have No Name opens the album by introducing fans what it means to the neighborhood divisions of wealth, religion, and cultural standing in Ireland that knowing the streets people live on tells you more about a person than the legitimate name of the streets. Therefore, the song carries the political conscious that is a hallmark of the band U2. The allusion to olive turning to rust, for example, is a clear reference to colors representing the Catholic and Protestant divide of Ireland from U2′s youth.
According to Bono from a magazine interview, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For is “an anthem of doubt more than faith,” as opposed to an anthem for love or spiritual enlightenment one might think at first listen. Gospel music is said to have been an inspiration for this song.
With or Without You is the song of a tortured relationship. The emotion of the song feels raw. The issues very well could have been the object of real relationships. That the song lends itself both to the intensity of a personal relationship plus that of the band with its fan lets me appreciate this song all the more.
Inspired by a trip Bono took to Central America in 1985 with Amnesty International, Bullet the Blue Sky was inspired by staying with a group of guerillas in the middle of El Salvador mountains in the north of the country.
Running to Stand Still is the final song from the first of two sides of The Joshua Tree album. Smuggling heroin into Dublin, Ireland is the subject matter, with some ruminations for how somebody gets themselves into such a place that this is their chosen path.
(From left, Larry McMullen Jr., Bono, Adam Clayton and The Edge of the band U2 in an image for The Joshua Tree).
Red Hill Mining Town opens the second side of The Joshua Tree album with a look at the human cost of a miner’s strike in the United Kingdom. A political homily of a song, the look is speaking of the humanity that is central to the worldview of the band U2.
In God’s Country moves to the politics of the United States, the ethos represented by The Statue of Liberty, and what politics of the mid-1980s means to that ethos.
Trip Through Your Wires sings of a relationship between a man and woman where the singer feels like the pun he plays on the notion of a trip wire works against him emotionally. Using a bluesy harmonica and drums baseline, getting caught up in an entanglement seems inevitable.
The song of a friendship prematurely lost comes alive with One Tree Hill. The friend lost is Greg Carroll, a Maori from New Zealand whose work ethic and friendship is praised by the song and the band.
Exit is said to be inspired by two books looking at famous murders, namely by Norman Mailer‘s The Executioner’s Song and Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood. (See our review of the Mailer book here). Bono is quoted in reference to this song as wanting to go beyond an abstract criticism of foreign policy by taking a look at “the violence we all contain within us.”
(From left, Adam Clayton, Larry McMullen Jr., Bono and The Edge of the band U2 in an image for The Joshua Tree).
Also inspired by a trip Bono took to Central America in 1985 during an El Savaldor Civil War, Mothers of the Disappeared sings of the Comadres, a group of women who had lost their children, who were taken in the night by death squads of the El Salvador Civil War. There was much sadness in this song for sure.
Matt – Saturday, August 8, 2020
Matt Lynn Digital 