Rock Band + French Horn = Awesome

I’m at that point in my interaction with the new U2 CD, No Line on the Horizon, where I haven’t yet grasped the meaning of any of the songs on the whole. I just keep hearing individual lines go by and thinking, “damn, that’s brilliant.” Here are a few examples:

• “It’s not if I believe in love / But if love believes in me.”
• “I was speeding on the subway / Through the stations of the cross / Every eye looking every other way / Counting down ’til the pain would stop / At the moment of surrender.”
• “Shout for joy if you get the chance.” (see Bono’s duet with Mick Jagger on Joy from Jagger’s great album Goddess in the Doorway.)
• “Laughter is eternity if joy is real.”
• “I’ve found grace inside a sound / I found grace, it’s all that I found / And I can breathe / Breathe now.”
• “The worst of us are a long drawn out confession / The best of us are geniuses of compression.”
• “Choose your enemies carefully ‘cos they will define you / Make them interesting ‘cos in some ways they will mind you / They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friend.”

The level I can speak to a little more intelligently is on the musical side. There are a couple of standout moments, but my favorite sixteen seconds on the record right now start at the four minute thirty second mark in Unknown Caller, where the outro starts. The band is rocking along, they sing the last lyric, and suddenly a pipe organ makes its presence known, holding a big chord above the band for four bars, rocking a sus note back and forth in half notes in the middle of the chord. And then, magic. The french horn enters. It’s only an eight bar solo, thirty notes in all, but it gets me every time. You hear a one-bar lick played three times, one step higher each time, with the organ playing along, and than a one-bar fill from the band. The horn lick is repeated, three bars – playing the middle notes from the previous passage twice, than a third higher – and then we get a one-bar fill from the Edge into his killer solo that goes to the end of the track.

There’s a reason U2 is called the best band in the world.