U2 Interview: Production of the new album “Carnaval De Luz”, Larry Mullen Jr.

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Today marks precisely 49 years and 342 days since the four members of U2 spent time together, and they still can’t get enough of each other. Or maybe they did. “Look, it’s been 50 years of hell,” says Larry Mullen Jr., sitting with his three bandmates at an outdoor lunch table just feet from the pointillist pastels of the Mediterranean. He looks dapper, as usual, in a black polo shirt and Wayfarers, his hair in a perpetual pompadour, shorn at the sides. “I mean, honestly, having to get these guys together, getting them to do the songs, it’s been hard. And then when it comes to touring, OK, the sets and all that, but my God, the haircuts. And then having to watch them from behind. Honestly, it’s been hard.”

“The mullet phase must have been terrible,” Edge said, once they’d all caught their breath from laughter.

“He only celebrated in the back!” » adds Bono.

It’s inevitably a beautiful day here in early September on the French Riviera, just 900 miles from the band’s birthplace, Mullen’s childhood kitchen in Dublin. In three weeks, these four guys will celebrate U2’s 50th anniversary in the least retrospective way possible, by announcing their first new album in nine years, Carnival of Luz, due November 13. Its first single, “Street of Dreams,” turns out to be something of a red herring, a soothing moment of status quo-U2 on an album more prone to risk, ambition and erratic energy. Its guiding theme is what Edge calls “defiant joy” in dark times, hence the carnival setting, which brings far more Spanish lyrics than one might expect from a purely Irish quartet.

“This record was probably made during the most troubled time we’ve ever been through,” says Bono, who is beginning to see the real devil at work in the world these days. “Not personally, but overall.” He notes that a new documentary on Ukraine, Black sunflowersbegins with a rave amid the ravages of war and evokes writer Dan Savage’s words about queer life during the AIDS crisis: “We buried our friends in the morning, we marched in the afternoon, and we danced all night… It was the dance we fought for.”

“It’s not about burying your head in the sand,” Bono continues. “It’s just saying, ‘These people can’t control our tempers.’ We don’t even need to name them, because everyone has their own version of who they are.

Summoning the spirit necessary to make a great U2 album at this late date comes with its own brand of challenge. “The past and I have to break up,” Bono sings on the opening track, the pleasantly discordant and Suicide-inspired, Brian Eno-assisted “Go (Carnaval De Luz),” offering a mission statement that echoes “I’m ready for what’s next” from “Zoo Station.” “More importantly,” the frontman adds to the table, leaning Bono on his own line, “any time a band like U2 goes into the studio, you kind of have to break up and make up. It’s a hard thing to say, but I think it’s partly true. Or certainly, there are pivotal albums where you know you have to start again.”

Stop it if you’ve heard this one before. At a concert in Dublin on New Year’s Eve 1989, he took the stage in a black cowboy hat and told the crowd: “We have to go away and dream it all again.” » The band embarked on a spectacular run of leather and neon in the decade that followed, only to fear they had drowned themselves in electronics on the 1997 record. Popular (even if titles like “Mofo” hold up). They got back to the basics of the musicians in the room with Everything you can’t leave behindbut not quite, because they had never written songs so simple and so moving. Twenty-six years later, Luz Carnival it feels like another starting point, a moment where anyone not named Mick or Keith could reasonably be looking at the finish line.

Their source has not changed. “Faith is at the very heart of this story called U2,” says Bono. Today’s hat, which he takes off at the table, is a rustic straw model; Today’s sunglasses are orange, reflective and with round lenses, like John Lennon. He wears head-to-toe dark gray linen, peeking out from black leather sandals. Behind him, against the restaurant’s white picket fence, is a vaguely biblical lime tree. “Faith in each other, I guess. Faith in ourselves, faith in our community that got us here. Faith that something bigger than us had the wind at our backs.”

Still, Edge entered the process with questions. He sits to Bono’s right, and could almost pass for his bodyguard, his black baseball cap pulled low, his gold chain draped over a black T-shirt. “Are we still relevant? “, the guitarist remembers asking. “Do we have anything to say that might interest anyone?” »Whether we are relevant or not is not up to us. But we can choose to to try and be relevant, and that’s what we decided. It was not, he adds, “a heavy thought. It was just an acceleration. It has to count. And first of all towards ourselves.

Luz Carnival is one of two EPs the band released earlier this year, Days of Ashes And Easter Lily. As an upcoming deluxe edition makes clear, the whole thing is essentially a double album built around the liturgical calendar and intended to be listened to that way: Carnival, Lent, Easter. We could also hear it as an eternal cycle, since the final sounds on the Easter EP turns out to be the first notes of Carnival. “Trying to ask a tired world to follow the liturgical calendar might be a lot to ask,” Bono says with a smile, “even of our most fervent fans. But maybe not. It’s an artistic project.”

On a lyric from the second EP, Bono borrows the first half of the title from a book he loves, The Death and Resurrection show: From shaman to superstarwhich unearths the mythical roots of show business. If you’re in U2, of course, that’s the nature of the concert, with your own liturgical calendar. You constantly recreate yourself, sometimes wandering so far that you get lost. You can rush off to write songs about Spider-Man. But you always find your way back, never quite unchanged. You’re teetering around in fashion, trying to save a world that doesn’t seem to want to be saved, perhaps appearing uninvited on a few hundred million phones, all while continually achieving transcendence and elevation in football stadiums. And you may have to learn the same lessons over and over again.

“It took us a long time to realize that the less you put into a recording, the better it sounded,” says Adam Clayton, who grew a rather dashing silver mustache. To match the carnival vibe, he chose a tropical shirt from Casablanca, decorated with colorful graphics of boxers. “And actually the band sounds pretty good.”

“Faith is at the very heart of this story called U2,” says Bono. “Faith in each other. Faith in ourselves, faith in our community that got us here.”

“We’re learning slowly,” says Mullen, who experienced his own slow, private resurrection for this album, after suffering a neck injury that led doctors to advise him to retire. “Learn very slowly.”

IN EARLY JUNE, less than three months before her death, an ailing Dolly Parton walked to a microphone and recorded the last vocal of her 70-year career. “Nothing hurts a mother more,” she sang, in a voice that was all the more authoritative because it was slightly trembling, “than a family at war.” The song was “Torn,” a duet with Bono that became the final track on Luz Carnival. “When she got sick, she got out of bed to sing this song,” Bono says. “And you can hear it. And I can’t even listen to it now.”

In the song’s final moments, The Edge hears something older than country music in Parton’s voice. “It’s like the enthusiasm at the end,” he said, “the Irishman gets enthusiastic at the funeral. And she has that in her blood.” His last words: “Every heart is torn. »

Bono had been pursuing Parton for months, initially for a side project of Irish origin, which is still ongoing. “There’s a courtship involved,” says Bono, who sent Parton bagpipes for her birthday. “There’s a chase. Dolly Parton is a sassy woman… Flirting is a part of her personality, and she doesn’t want to get out of it. And that’s one of the reasons I admire her so much.” He played her some sketches over the phone, including one called “Lifelong.” “She said, ‘That’s a bit too Irish,’” he recalls.

“She didn’t have any of it,” adds the album’s producer, Garret “Jacknife” Lee, who has worked with U2 on and off since 2004. How to dismantle an atomic bomb. “It’s understandable, because the songs weren’t good.” He remembers Parton telling U2, “Yeah, I want to make a song. You just haven’t given me one that I can sing.”

So she sent one of her own, “Torn,” the story of a woman trying to choose between two men. Bono saw potential, but he and Snow Patrol collaborator Johnny McDaid of the folk project rewrote the…