Edge, The

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares23 Views

    The Edge, U2’s Guitarist, Becomes Irish Citizen After 62 Years There

    by

    The musician born David Evans was one of more than 7,500 people who became citizens in a series of ceremonies in southwest Ireland this week.The Edge, the U2 guitarist known for his omnipresent black beanie and his chiming, echoey sound, became an Irish citizen this week. It only took him 62 years.“I’m a little tardy on the paperwork,” the English-born musician, whose real name is David Evans, told reporters at the ceremony on Monday. “I’ve been living in Ireland now since I was 1 year old, but the time is right and I couldn’t be more proud of my country for all that it represents and all that it’s doing.”A representative for U2 did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.More than 7,500 people were granted citizenship in a series of ceremonies Monday and Tuesday in Killarney in County Kerry, nearly 200 miles southwest of Dublin, according to the Irish government. Applicants from over 140 countries made a declaration of fidelity and loyalty to the state. Since 2011, more than 200,000 people have received Irish citizenship.Evans, 63, was born in Essex to Welsh parents and moved to Ireland as a young child.The band formed in 1976 when Larry Mullen Jr. tacked a “musicians wanted” ad to a bulletin board in Dublin, according to the band’s website. The group — Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton (bass) and Mullen (drums), then all teenagers — practiced in Mullen’s kitchen.U2 became perhaps the most recognizable and successful rock group from Ireland and is considered by many fans there to be something of a national treasure. At the citizenship ceremony, Evans said that Ireland was showing “real leadership” on the world stage and that his becoming a citizen couldn’t have come at a better moment. “I have always felt Irish,” he told reporters, saying he was happy “to be in even deeper connection with my homeland.”Evans said the application process took a couple of years but was ultimately straightforward.“Honestly there were many moments in the past when I could have done it, with just the form to be filled out, but I’m happy it’s now,” he said. “It feels more significant, it feels more meaningful.” More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      In ‘Songs of Surrender’, U2 Revisits Its Past

      by

      With “Songs of Surrender,” an album of 40 reimagined songs, and “A Sort of Homecoming,” a documentary on Disney+, the Irish band pauses to reflect.For decades, U2 refused to rest on its catalog. A rarity among bands for having kept the same lineup since its formation in 1976 — Bono on lead vocals, the Edge on guitar and keyboards, Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen Jr. on drums — U2 has headlined arenas since the early 1980s. It determinedly brought new songs to huge audiences as recently as 2018, when it mounted its Experience + Innocence Tour.The band did allow itself a 30th anniversary stadium tour to reprise its biggest release, the 1987 album “The Joshua Tree,” in 2017 and 2019. And now, in the pandemic era, U2 is looking back even further.Its new album, “Songs of Surrender,” remakes 40 U2 songs with largely acoustic arrangements. U2 has also booked a Las Vegas residency for the fall, when it will revisit its 1991 masterpiece, “Achtung Baby,” in a newly built arena, the MSG Sphere. In a startling change, the band will have a substitute drummer, Bram van den Berg, rather than Mullen, who has been dealing with injuries to his elbows, knees and neck.Bono, 62, published his memoir, “Surrender,” in fall of 2022, using 40 U2 songs as chapter headings. On St. Patrick’s Day, the (Irish) band is releasing a Disney+ documentary, “Bono & the Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, With Dave Letterman,” alongside “Songs of Surrender.”U2’s career has been one of triumphs, misfires and moving on. In the 1980s, the group was earnest and expansive, creating a chiming, marching, larger-than-life rock sound that countless bands would emulate. In the 1990s, leery of its own pretensions, U2 remade itself with electronic beats and artifice until it came to a dead end with its 1997 album, “Pop.” In the 2000s, it circled back to rock beats and sincerity, but its music was pervasively infused with the latest technology.From the beginning, U2 has worked on the largest scale: sometimes to magnificent effect, like its 2002 Super Bowl halftime show that memorialized Sept. 11, and sometimes badly backfiring, like the giveaway of its 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence,” that forced the album into iTunes libraries worldwide, often unwanted. “Songs of Surrender” is an act of renunciation, drastically scaling down songs that once strove to shake entire stadiums.Remake albums are always fraught. They offer second thoughts rather than discoveries, revisions rather than inspirations. They also remind listeners, and no doubt performers, of time slipping away.In recent years, extraordinary songwriters like Paul Simon and Natalie Merchant have made albums that revisit their old songs with decidedly different arrangements; they’re thoughtful and musicianly, but wan. Even Taylor Swift’s ongoing series of “Taylor’s Version” remakes — reclaiming her old albums by making every effort to replicate them note for note — can’t quite match her more youthful voice or the precise overtones of every mix.Among U2’s three retrospective projects, Bono’s book is by far the most vivid. “Surrender” leapfrogs through Bono’s and U2’s improbable story in vignettes that zigzag between poetic and prosaic, devout and skeptical, privileged and conscientious, mystical and political.The book’s messages about faith, friendship and family are reprised — sometimes in near-literal quotes — in “A Sort of Homecoming.” It’s an awkward project that skims through U2’s career while David Letterman serves as both modest interlocutor and celebrity star-tripper.The documentary mixes biographical interviews and bits of Ireland’s history, and it stages two performances: a concert by Bono and the Edge with a choir and strings at Dublin’s Ambassador Theater, and a singalong at a pub that’s not exactly impromptu. It just happens to include U2-influenced Irish musicians like Glen Hansard, Imelda May and Dermot Kennedy. “A Sort of Homecoming” also digresses, pointlessly, with attempts at comedy recalling Letterman’s “Late Show” shticks. A new Bono-Edge song, dedicated to Letterman, isn’t exactly prime U2.“Songs of Surrender” is the weightier project. Like all of U2’s albums, it’s anything but casual; the songs have been minutely reconsidered. Some get different lyrics: changing present tense to past tense in “Red Hill Mining Town,” clarifying that “Bad” is about drug addiction, swapping in new verses in “Beautiful Day” and “Get Out of Your Own Way,” rewriting “Walk On” to allude to the war in Ukraine.The album sets out to recast U2’s arena anthems as private conversations. Bono croons as if he’s singing quietly into your ear, and most of the arrangements rely on acoustic guitar or piano — like MTV’s old “Unplugged” shows, but by no means devoid of studio enhancements.“Unplugged” was MTV’s tribute to the recording-business cliché that a great song only needs chords and a voice to reveal its quality, as if everything else is embellishment. Yes and no. Melody, harmony and lyrics say a lot, but production can be transformative. Songs engrave themselves in fans’ memories — and lives — not just for their words and music, but for their sheer sound. We can recognize a favorite oldie from an opening guitar tone or a drumbeat. And the more we’ve taken a song to heart, the more its sonic details resonate.U2 got together in the era when punk insisted that anyone, trained or not, could make vital music. But even during that movement, musicians and producers understood how much texture matters. Recording in the analog era was a costly, intentional effort, and low-budget, lo-fi recordings could still create high intensity.One of U2’s enduring strengths has been the way its songs ennoble yearning and turbulence. Bono sings about self-questioning and contradictions with a voice that might scratch or falter but pushes ahead, unabashedly working itself up to shouts and howls. And the band’s martial drums, chiming guitars and inexorable crescendos create arena-size superstructures filled with rhythmic — and emotional — crosscurrents.The remakes on “Songs of Surrender” often strip away too much. In the original 1983 “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a song about a terrorist bombing during Ireland’s “troubles,” the track evokes sirens and gunshots while Bono sounds both desperate and furious, right in the middle of the strife. The remake, with a lone acoustic guitar, recasts the song as something between a lullaby and lament, crooned as if it’s a learned memory.“Out of Control,” which in 1979 had jabbing, buttonholing electric guitar and bass lines, has become a cozy, cheerfully strummed self-affirmation, very much in control. And the surging, cathartic peaks of songs like “With or Without You,” “Vertigo,” and “Pride (in the Name of Love)” are far too muted in the remakes.“Songs of Surrender” does have a few clever second thoughts about U2’s catalog. A brass band lends historical gravity to “Red Hill Mining Town,” while “Two Hearts Beat as One” — with lyrics that insist, “Can’t stop to dance” — gets a wry disco makeover. The album’s subdued arrangements and upfront vocals offer a chance to focus on lyrics that were obscured in the onrush of U2’s original versions.But for most of “Songs of Surrender,” less is simply less. What comes across throughout the 40 songs is not intimacy, but distance: the inescapable fact that these songs are being rethought and revived years later, not created anew. Wild original impulses have been replaced by latter-day self-consciousness. And U2, like most artists, is better off looking ahead than looking back. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Nicki Minaj Reunites With Lil Wayne and Drake, and 13 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Olivia Rodrigo, Tony Allen, L’Rain and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Nicki Minaj with Drake and Lil Wayne, ‘Seeing Green’In honor of Nicki Minaj’s still-incendiary 2009 debut mixtape “Beam Me Up Scotty” finally arriving on streaming services, she’s organized a little YMCMB family reunion. “Seeing Green” is more of a status update than a club banger à la the trio’s classic “Truffle Butter,” but everyone is still in fine form. Wayne, as usual, plays the gonzo court jester, and he seizes the opportunity to unload all of those pandemic-related rhymes he’s been holding onto for the last year (“I put you six feet deep, I’m being socially distant”). Nicki locks back into her standard eviscerate-the-haters flow, and Drake continues to rap with a precision and bite that suggests, as did the recent “Scary Hours 2,” that whenever his promised “Certified Lover Boy” arrives, it might actually be worth the wait. “I played 48 minutes on a torn meniscus,” he boasts, “who’s subbing?” (But maybe see a doctor about that, Drake — it’s serious!) LINDSAY ZOLADZOlivia Rodrigo, ‘Good 4 U’The third single from Olivia Rodrigo’s forthcoming debut album, “Sour,” tells a story that will be familiar to anyone who’s heard her first single, “Driver’s License”: A former flame moves on too quickly after a breakup, leaving Rodrigo alone with all her feelings. But this time the 18-year-old Disney actress refracts it through a different lens and a whole new sonic palette. Though it starts off quiet, by the chorus “Good 4 U” explodes into a kind of “You Oughta Know” for the TikTok era, all righteous anger and pop-punky, primal-scream rage: “Good for you, you’re doing great out there without me — like a damn sociopath!” ZOLADZTorres, ‘Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head’The new song from Mackenzie Scott — who makes brooding, searching indie-rock under the name Torres — might be the most accessible thing she’s ever released. And she knows it: She’s wryly described “Don’t Go Putting Wishes in My Head,” the first single from her forthcoming album “Thirstier,” as “my relentless arena country star moment.” More than anything, though, with its buzzing synths and soaring chorus, “Wishes” recalls the Killers at their most fist-clenchingly anthemic. “Just when I thought that it was over, it was only just beginning,” Scott sings, her voice trembling with intensity. She seems to understand that accepting joy can sometimes be an even more vulnerable act than confessing pain, but by the end of the song she sounds fearless, and ready to move toward the light. ZOLADZTony Allen, ‘Mau Mau’The drummer Tony Allen supplied the rhythmic foundation for Fela Kuti’s Nigerian Afrobeat in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on West African traditions, jazz and funk, he built an architecture of unpredictable offbeats, unhurried but kinetic. Before his death in 2020, he had started a hip-hop project, creating beats and synthesizer bass lines and lining up vocalists. Allen’s new album, “There Is No End,” was completed posthumously by the producers Vincent Taeger and Vincent Taurelle. “Mau Mau” features Nah Eeto, a rapper from Kenya, with multitracked vocals that calmly bounce around the syllables of her lyrics — some in English, some not — to highlight all the ways Allen could dodge the downbeat while constantly flicking the music onward. JON PARELESMaría Grand, ‘Now, Take, Your, Day’The rising tenor saxophonist María Grand wrote the tunes that appear on “Reciprocity,” her new LP, in the middle of a pregnancy, while reading spiritual texts and paying close attention to the bond she was building with her not-yet-born child. (The album’s liner notes include her written reflections on becoming a mother, and how this found its way into the music.) The album, featuring Kanoa Mendenhall on bass and Savannah Harris on drums, is also a testament to the constant regeneration that becomes possible within a close musical partnership; on track after track, Grand dances nimbly over Harris’s subtly shifting patterns, and Mendenhall stubbornly insists on never repeating herself. “Now, Take, Your, Day” begins with all three members singing the song’s title in harmony, before the rhythm section lays down a loosely funky beat and Grand introduces the song’s downward-slanting melody on saxophone. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBella Poarch, ‘Build a Bitch’Like many TikTok stars, Bella Poarch is making a move into her own music. “Build a Bitch” comes across cute and furious. Tinkly toy-piano sounds and perky la-las accompany her as she points out that women aren’t consumer products. “You don’t get to pick and choose/Different ass and bigger boobs,” she coos. “If you need perfect, I’m not built for you.” A post-“Westworld” video set in an android factory ends, inevitably, in mayhem. PARELESSleater-Kinney, ‘Worry With You’The forthcoming, self-produced Sleater-Kinney album “Path of Wellness” will be the first the Portland band releases as a duo, since its longtime power-drummer Janet Weiss departed in 2019, and her absence certainly makes the song feel a bit muted and minor. But there’s still a familiar pleasure in hearing Carrie Brownstein’s snaking guitar riffs and staccato vocals intertwine with Corin Tucker’s, as they sing of a long-term togetherness that’s provided comfort in good times and bad: “If I’m gonna mess up,” they avow, “I’m gonna mess up with you.” ZOLADZMartin Garrix featuring Bono & The Edge, ‘We Are the People’The official 2020 UEFA European Football Championship song is exactly what you’d expect from a soccer anthem by a big-room EDM D.J. collaborating with half of U2: a grand, thumping march with pinging guitars, vast synthesizer swells and determinedly inspirational lyrics. “You’ve faith and no fear for the fight,” Bono sings, “You pull hope from defeat in the night.” The song uses familiar tools for stadium-scale uplift, but they can still work. PARELESHolly Macve, ‘You Can Do Better’Regrets and reverb both loom large on Holly Macve’s second album, “Not the Girl,” a set of country-rooted ballads that place her reedy voice — determinedly sustained through countless breaks and quavers — in wide-screen, retro arrangements. “You Can Do Better” is a stately, swaying waltz, a breakup-and-makeup scenario that builds up to dramatic questions, swirling across voices and strings: “Is it so wrong to love you?/Is it so wrong to care?” PARELESL’Rain, ‘Blame Me’L’Rain — the songwriter, musician and producer Taja Cheek — opens an ever-widening, ever more disorienting sonic vortex in “Blame Me,” from her second album, “Fatigue,” due June 25. Sparse guitars pick fragments of chords that fall, then rise, as L’Rain muses cryptically on mortality and remorse. Soon, they’re enveloped by a ghostly orchestra and distant voices intoning, “Waste away now, make my way down”; as the track ends, she’s still in a lush harmonic and emotional limbo. PARELESElaine, ‘Right Now’Elaine is from South Africa, where she already has a large audience. But her sound bespeaks international R&B ambitions, with programmed trap drum sounds and an American accent. In “Right Now,” she tries to juggle a damaged relationship against a burgeoning career. “I cannot continue carrying all your insecurities/I got more priorities,” she sings, quietly but adamantly. Her alto is low, intimate and flexible; with her priorities, she’s not about to indulge a cheating ex, even if she’s tempted. PARELESAlan Jackson, ‘Where Have You Gone’“Where Have You Gone,” the title song of Alan Jackson’s new, 21-song album, starts off like a lonely lament for someone who’s left him: “It’s been way too long since you slipped away.” But it turns out he’s lamenting the way “sweet country music” used to sound: steel guitar, fiddle, “words from the heart.” It’s the style Jackson has upheld through his career, looking back to Merle Haggard and George Jones, only to see it supplanted lately by arena-country and infiltrations of hip-hop. “The airwaves are waiting,” he insists; current country radio says otherwise. PARELESSons of Kemet featuring Moor Mother and Angel Bat Dawid, ‘Pick Up Your Burning Cross’Over the rough rhythmic onrush of this United Kingdom-based quartet — featuring Theon Cross’s pulsing tuba, Shabaka Hutchings’s roof-raising saxophone and the interlocked drumming of Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner — a voice hovers, singing and speaking and laughing. It belongs to Angel Bat Dawid, and it’s soon joined by that of Moor Mother, another revolutionary poet and musician from this side of the Atlantic. “I don’t think you remember me/I was in last place,” Moor Mother begins, serving notice as the band presses ahead. The piece is on “Black to the Future,” Sons of Kemet’s fourth album. RUSSONELLOErika Dohi, ‘Particle Of …’Erika Dohi, a Japanese keyboardist and composer now based in New York City, is one of the musicians affiliated with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver’s label 37d03d (“people” upside-down). “Particle Of …” comes from her new album “I, Castorpollux,” and while it was composed by Andy Akiho (who also directed her music video), it fits the album’s aesthetic of Minimalistic repetitions and startling fractures. It uses percussive, single-note patterns on piano and prepared piano, played live and then computer manipulated, equally virtuosic and digitally skewed. Chords arrive at the end, like a surprise visit from 20th-century modernism. PARELES More