Baby Edition Track Listings

How many of you own a copy of Achtung Baby ? You could own the Vinyl, CD, or Digital copy at least once over the last couple of years. So when you heard about the release or we call it a reissue you really had only one major question right ? Well the bonus stuff is pretty interesting and of course we will provide you the full details of everything that is avialable on all verisions.  Check out our special Achtung Baby section which will break down everything for you.

For example: Extremely limited numbered Uber Deluxe Edition is a magnetic puzzle tiled box contains six CDs including the original Achtung Baby album, the follow-up album, Zooropa, b-sides and re-workings of previously unheard material recorded during the Achtung Baby sessions. Four DVDs including “From The Sky Down”, Zoo TV, all the videos from Achtung Baby plus bonus material. Also includes five clear seven inch vinyl singles in their original sleeves, 16 art prints taken from the original album sleeve, an 84-page hardback book, a copy of Propaganda magazine, four badges, a sticker sheet, and a pair of Bono’s trademark “The Fly” sunglasses. Band members sold separately.

Song Highlight:

“One“  It is the third track from their 1991 album Achtung Baby, and it was released as the record’s third single in March 1992. During the album’s recording, conflict arose between the band members over the direction of U2’s sound and the quality of their material. Tensions almost prompted the band to break up, until guitarist The Edge composed a chord progression that inspired the group to improvise the song, which was written as a ballad. The band worked on the mix for “One” throughout the remainder of the album’s sessions. The lyrics, written by lead singer Bono, describe fracturing interpersonal relationships, but they have been interpreted in other ways.

“One” was released as a benefit single, with proceeds going towards AIDS research. The song reached number seven on the UK Singles Chart and number ten on the Billboard Hot 100, and it topped the US Billboard Album Rock Tracks and Modern Rock Tracks charts. In promotion of the song, the band had several music videos filmed, although they were not pleased until the third video was created.

The song has since been acclaimed as one of the greatest songs of all time, and it is consistently featured in listener and critic polls. The song has been played by U2 at every one of their tour concerts since the song’s live debut in 1992, and it has appeared in many of the band’s concert films. In a live setting, “One” is often used by the band to promote human rights or social justice causes, and the song lends its namesake to Bono’s charitable organization, the ONE Campaign. In 2006, U2 re-recorded the song as part of a duet with contemporary R&B singer Mary J. Blige.

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” trailer was just released. On a U2 song, we are introduced to the life of a family who lost a member in the 9/11 tragedy. Tom Hanks, Thomas Horn and Sandra Bullock walk us around the Central park and the World Trade Center Towers, offering a glimpse of the action.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a drama movie which tells the story of a boy who is only nine years old, but who is already an inventor, a jewelry designer and a tambourine player and is confronted with a tragedy. His father died in the 9/11 attacks. Now, he found a key he does not know anything about but the fact that it matches a mysterious lock somewhere. He goes in search of the lock in the hope that he will find out what it hides and that maybe it has something to do with his father. A significant detail is that, in fact, it was his father who gave him the key, prior to the day of his death.

The movie is adapted from the book with the same title, written by Eric Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer. In the book, the boy, Oskar Schell discovers the key in a vase in his home. The action starts two years after his father’s death in September11, 2001.

October

October

And the trees are stripped bare

Of all they wear

What do I care

October

And kingdoms rise

And kingdoms fall

But you go on…

At the beginning of every October, I play this track. I don’t know why, but I just do. The song is a haunting song, consisting of 26 words and two themes. 

The first theme has to do with death. Obviously, it’s Bono’s reflection of a tree losing its leaves, which I think is a metaphor about losing his mother. The mother I feel he is speaking of is Mother Nature, stripping us bear of our emotional being as we take on winter. As I listen to the track, I envision a heavy, grey sky above me, almost suffocating. A lone tree, away from the forest on the horizon, stands naked before me.

The image is not in color but in high contrast black and white. The starkness reminds me of those days trekking across the University of Iowa campus as fall slipped into winter. Harsh wind, howling through the through the streets flanked by buildings made of brick and limestone, wisps dry leaves from unsecured spot to another.  

The second theme spoken here is one of kingdoms and very little has been said about this other that it may be a reference to the Russian revolution. It’s interesting how these two themes meet in this song, especially when the band was still in their religious phase as the album October was being worked on. Kingdoms could also loosely refer to the Kingdom of God or Jerusalem or Babylon or Rome for that matter. Yet, it is has been said that Bono was reflecting on the Bolshevik October uprising and how that intertwines with the emotions of losing a mother is the biggest mystery here.

I will say this, October, for this U2 fan, has been the biggest month of my life. I saw th Irish quartet in concert for the first time on October 20^th, 1987. I was just a sophomore in college at the University of Iowa when Bono et al came to Iowa City to play on the Joshua Tree tour. Our campus wasn’t on the initial tour schedule. We got the show by default thanks to the University of Northern Iowa not allowing the band to set-up their outdoor stage.

It was a stroke of luck that they came and played Carver Hawkeye Arena on that foggy night where trees were stripped bare of all they wore much like in the song. A year later, I relived my Joshua Tree tour experience when the band released Rattle & Hum on compact disc.  It would be another three Octobers before their next release, Achtung Baby, and I waited them out – patiently and impatiently.

Eric Shivvers is the author of I’m a Fan: How I married U2 into my life without going to the altar. You may find him on Facebook: I’m a U2 fan or on Twitter: @iamau2fan. His book is available at Amazon.com.

U2's Larry Mullen Jr. on the big screen

Larry Mullen Jr and Donald Sutherland / Man on the Train The English-language remake of Patrice Leconte’s award-winning French film of the same name, Man on the Train stars Donald Sutherland and musician Larry Mullen, Jr. in his acting debut.

A mysterious criminal (Mullen Jr.) rolls into a small town planning to knock off the local bank, assuming it will go off without a hitch. But when he encounters a retired poetry professor (Sutherland), his plans take an unlikely turn. With no place to stay, the professor generously welcomes him into his home. As the two men talk, a bond forms between these two polar opposites, and surprising moments of humor and compassion emerge. As they begin to understand each other more, they each examine the choices they’ve made in their lives, secretly longing to live the type of lifestyle the other man has lived, based on the desire to escape their own.

A superb re-make of Patrick Leconte’s 2002 film, Man on the Train is a scrumptiously literate character drama. Starring Donald Sutherland and Larry Mullen, Jr., this well-crafted entertainment’s appeal will be to a mature, intelligent demographic.

In this re-incarnation, Sutherland stars as a retired literature professor, who, in his own parlance, seems cut out of the mold of J. Alfred Prufrock. Throughout his cautious life, he’s been a man who did not “dare to eat a peach.”  Refined and restrained, he lives alone in the posh home his mother left him. Amid his books and protected by his reserve, he is, as Eliot’s poem goes, “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.”

The stale professor, however, is stirred by a chance meeting with his psychological and professional opposite, a laconic criminal (Mullen) who rides into town on a train. This mystery man is in cahoots to rob the local bank, the very day that the Professor is to have heart surgery. Opposites do attract in this witty character study as the Professor takes in the itinerant to stay a few days in his comfy manse.

Their polar differences spark a friendship: Each learns from the other’s point-of-view and way-of-life. Under Mary McGuckian’s perceptive hand, we’re treated to an unlikely personal bonding of two divergent personalities.

Man on the Trainis a ripe illumination, buoyed by the sterling lead performances of Sutherland and Mullen. Sutherland lays out the rich inner life of a man who holds disappointment for the cautious existence he has maintained. Wondrously, the uneducated blunt stranger’s probes and blunt observations jolt the professor from his self-constraining views. From this uneducated bloke, he becomes aware that, in his own way, he has led a rich life, albeit manifested by his inner being.

In exchange, the detached professor enriches the straightforward criminal to an alternate appreciation of life, as well.

Cinematographer Stefan von Bjorn’s silken hues and production designer Jennifer Carroll’s vibrant furnishings are precisely right for this full-bodied film.  

Venue: Cannes Film Festival
Based on the 2002 Patrick Leconte film
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Larry Mullen, Jr., Paula Boudreau, Graham Greene, Kate O’Toole, Greg Byrk, Samuel Jephcott

Director: 

Mary McGuckian

U2tober is for U2 Authors

October has been a music industry month. Releases from all your favorite bands have been scheduled for October. You have heard the term Rocktober. What’s so special about October.

U2 fans know that October has some special meaning. We thought we would celebrate October with a new selection. 

October will be U2 authors month. Yes if you have written a story about U2, U2 fans or about your experience and have a published book we want to share your work with U2 fans around the world.

Contact us this week September 26 - 28th to be selected. You will be offered a weekly or daily byline where you can share your work and gain some new found support for your work.

Currently we are interested in the written word, however we will consider photo collections, audio collections for the next phase of the project. We request all work to be submitted by the orginal writer. You will retain all rights to your book, story.

Don’t worry if you don’t have images, or web skills our crafty team will create everything for you. All you need to do is write. We look forward to reading your submissions and wish you all a very happy U2tober.  

Please send all submissions to our editor in chief directly.  We will do our best to contact every submission. However we will be contacting approved submissions first. Please submit all work during the week of September 26th -

Guidines: Submissions should be no more than 5000 englsh words or translated into english with the orginal lanaguage included.  All work needs to be provided by the orginal writter. 

Writters with a agent or part of a publishing house will need to have approval from their team prior to submissions. 

Indpendent writters can submit without publishing house or agent engagements. If you have questions please submit them.

This is not a contest, no prizes will  be awarded and all web content will be copy right retained by the author.

Looking into 2 Ultraviolet (Light My Way)

“Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” began as two different demos, one variously called “Ultraviolet” and “69” (which eventually evolved into the B-side “Lady with the Spinning Head”) and an alternately arranged demo called “Light My Way”^. Trying to write the bridge to a song (which conflicting reports state was “Ultraviolet”, “Mysterious Ways”, and “The Fly”), guitarist The Edge improvised a riff that the rest of the band rallied around. It was out of this that “One”, which changed the outlook of recording sessions for the album, was born.

Over the course of the recording sessions, U2 added various overdubs to the song, but producer Brian Eno believed these additions negatively impacted the track. Eno aided the group in editing down the song, and he explained his assistance as such: “I’d go in and say, ‘The song has gone, whatever it is you liked about this song is not there anymore. Sometimes, for example, the song would have disappeared under layers of overdubs.”

The lyrics of “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” are addressed to a lover, and imply that their relationship is Indeed, lead vocalist Bono has called the song “a little disturbed”. The song opens with 45 seconds of soft synthesizers producing an ethereal sighing, crying, almost breathing sound, somewhat akin in atmospherics to the group’s early 1980s songs “Tomorrow” and “Drowning Man”; during this, Bono laments that “sometimes I feel like checking out.”

This is followed by the entrance of drums and guitar in a familiar U2 rhythm, as Bono describes the burdens of love and how he is “in the black; can’t see or be seen.”

Each verse culminates with the refrain “Baby, baby, baby, light my way.” Flood, who engineered and mixed the recording, noted that there was considerable laughter and debate during the sessions about whether Bono could get away with singing the repeated “baby”s, one of the most heavily-used clichés in pop songs and one that he had avoided up to that point in his songwriting; Flood later commented that “he got away with it alright.^”threatened by some sort of personal or spiritual crisis, coupled with a sense of unease over obligations.

Although the song is ostensibly about love and dependency, like many U2 songs, it also lends itself to religious interpretations. Listeners have heard an allusion to the Book of Job 29:2–3 and its tale of God serving as a lamp upon Job’s head walking through the darkness. Robyn Brothers suggests that ultraviolet light is “a metaphor for a divine force both unseen to the naked eye and ultimately unknowable to the human intellect.”

Conversely, Steve Stockman, author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey Of U2 , sees “Ultraviolet” as being about Bono’s wife Ali, and “how when he feels like trash, she makes him clean,” but says there is good reason to interpret the song as being just as much about God.

The song’s title supports this view: indigo and violet rarely appear in song lyrics as frequently as other colours, while ultraviolet represents an unseen wavelength beyond the visible spectrum. As such, the title evokes the image of black light or an invisible force permeating the darkness, whose connotations are spiritual and personal, as well as technological, reflecting themes of modern alienation explored elsewhere on Achtung Baby and its follow-up album,Zooropa (See all Pop Music CDs) .

Dianne Ebertt Beeaff, author of A Grand Madness, Ten Years on the Road with U2 , sees the song’s narrator as longing for assistance from any source, religious or secular: “This is a real plea, a bleary worn-down drained wish to disappear. A drowning man desperate to hold hands in the darkness, to have someone else point the way, to be safe and obscure.^” Atara Stein sees “Ultraviolet” as one of several selections on the album in which the protagonist in crisis has elevated his lover into an object of worship, desperate for her to “return to her initial role as his guide and salvation.”

“Ultraviolet” is also one of several songs Bono has written on the theme of woman as spirit, and it echoes the band’s 1980 song “Shadows and Tall Trees” by juxtaposing love with the image of ceilings. A line in Raymond Carver’s late 1980s poem “Suspenders”, about the quiet that comes into a house where no one can sleep, was subconsciously recycled by Bono into the lyric. In Achtung Baby’s running order, “Ultraviolet” serves, with the other two songs at the album’s end, “Acrobat” and “Love Is Blindness”, to explore how couples face the task of reconciling the suffering they have imposed on each other.

The song features a Motown sound-style “telegraph key” rhythm, which gave it the feeling of a pop song. This and the “baby, baby” refrain gave the song a throwaway quality that fit in with Achtung Baby’s mission of deconstructing U2’s image.Paradoxically, the arrangement also featured U2’s 1980s “repeato-riff” guitar style and the rest of the lyric was a serious love song that dealt with themes of anxiety and despair.

Bono has described “Ultraviolet” as “an epic U2 song [but] the key of it left my voice in a conversational place and allowed a different kind of lyric writing.” Producer Eno wrote that a combination of opposites within each song was a signature characteristic of Achtung Baby and that as part of that, “Ultraviolet” had a “helicopterish melancholy”. In Achtung Baby’s album package, “Ultraviolet” is presented next to a photograph of a crumbling Berlin building that has a Trabant parked in front of it.

Who the "F" is Tom Meighan ?

Tom Meigham/Kasabian Kasabian star Tom Meighan hated touring with Irish rockers U2, and he has branded the gigs “horrible” and the “worst ever”.

The British band joined forces with the superstar group to open for them on a number of their 360 shows, but Meighan wishes they had never agreed to join the tour.

He tells News.com.au, “I didn’t take in anything supporting them, them gigs (sic) were horrible. Worst ever. U2 fans are cardboard cut-outs. Can you imagine supporting U2? Their fans are probably into one band and one album - Joshua Tree. I didn’t learn anything ‘cos that’s just a f**king different level. It was amazing to watch and meet them, but I didn’t learn anything apart from just get the f**k out.”

Meighan is now adamant he will never agree to be an opening act ever again, adding, “I hate supporting bands, we’re not a support band. So that’s never gonna happen again.”

BBC Picks UP U2 Documentary

BBC Worldwide Canada, part of the BBC’s commercial arm, has picked up distribution rights to Davis Guggenheim’s U2 film From the Sky Down (pictured), which earlier this month became the first documentary to ever open the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

The documentary celebrates the 20th anniversary of U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby!, the creation of which marked a major turning point for the band musically.

Earlier this year, U2 returned to Hansa Studios in Berlin, the site where they first recorded the album, with Oscar-winning director Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for “Superman”) in tow, to make the doc.

Following the film’s September 8 premiere at TIFF, Guggenheim and U2 band members Bono and The Edge held a press conference to discuss the making of the film and highlight their favorite rock documentaries, paying praise to filmmakers including Jonathan Demme, DA Pennebaker and Martin Scorsese.