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      In ‘Songs of Surrender’, U2 Revisits Its Past

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      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

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      Island Records’ Chris Blackwell Finally Tells His Story

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      In a new memoir, the 84-year-old founder of Island Records reflects on helping bring the music of Bob Marley, U2 and Grace Jones to the world.Most music industry memoirs are front-loaded with celebrity name-dropping. “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond” by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records — whose success with Bob Marley, U2, Steve Winwood and Grace Jones would offer plenty to boast about — instead opens with a parable.In 1955, Blackwell was a wealthy, 18-year-old Englishman whose family was part of Jamaica’s colonial elite. Lost and thirsty after his motorboat ran out of gas, Blackwell came across a Rastafari man — a member of what was then still an outcast group feared by Anglo-Jamaicans as menacing “black heart men.” But this Samaritan in dreads took Blackwell into his community, offering him food, water and a place to rest; the young visitor awoke to find his hosts softly reading from the Bible.That encounter set Blackwell on a remarkable path through music, with Jamaica at its center. He is one of the people most responsible for popularizing reggae throughout the world, and as Island grew to a trans-Atlantic mini-empire of rock, folk, reggae and pop, it became a model for nimble and eclectic indie labels everywhere.Yet it may be impossible now to not also see the Rastafari episode through the lens of race and colonialism, as the story of a privileged young man gaining access to the primarily Black culture that would make him rich and powerful. Blackwell, who turns 85 this month, acknowledged that debt in a recent interview.“I was just somebody who was a fan,” he said, in a mellow upper-class accent shaped by his time at British public schools. “I grew up amongst Black people. I spent more time with Black people than white people because I was an only child and I was sick. They were the staff, the gardeners, the grooms. But I got to care a lot about them and got to recognize very early how different their life was from mine.”When asked why he started the label, in 1959, he said: “I guess I thought I’d just have a go. It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit record or something. It was really trying to uplift the artists.”From left: U2’s the Edge, Bono, the band’s manager Paul McGuinness, Blackwell and Adam Clayton.L. Cohen/WireImage, via Getty ImagesALTHOUGH HE IS from the same generation of music impresarios as Berry Gordy and Clive Davis, who have been tending their reputations in public for decades, Blackwell is perhaps the most publicity-shy and least understood of the so-called “record men.” As label boss or producer, he has been behind era-defining music by Cat Stevens, Traffic, Roxy Music, the B-52’s, Robert Palmer and Tom Tom Club, not to mention U2 and Marley.Yet in his heyday Blackwell went so far to avoid the limelight that few photos exist of him with Marley — he did not want to be seen as the white Svengali to a Black star. Meeting last month for coffee and eggs near the Upper West Side apartment where he spends a few weeks a year, Blackwell had a thin white beard and was dressed in faded sweats and sneakers. Back in Jamaica, his preferred footwear is flip-flops, or nothing at all.“It’s not an exaggeration to say Chris offered a role model to some of us on how to live,” Bono of U2 wrote in an email. “I remember him saying to me once standing outside one of his properties: ‘Try not to shove your success in the face of people who don’t have as much success. Try to be discreet.’ His perfect manners and plummy tremolo of a voice never came across as entitlement. He was himself at all times.”Paul Morley, the music journalist who wrote “The Islander” with Blackwell, said it was only after Blackwell sold Island to PolyGram in 1989, for nearly $300 million — it is now part of the giant Universal Music Group — that he began to show any interest in claiming his place in history.“Chris always likes to be in the background,” said Jones, who released her first Island record in 1977. “I’m even surprised that he’s done the book.”BORN IN 1937 to a family that had made its fortune in Jamaica growing sugar cane and making rum, Blackwell grew up on the island around wealthy Brits and vacationing celebrities. His mother, Blanche, was friendly with Errol Flynn and Noël Coward. She also had a longtime affair with Ian Fleming, who wrote his James Bond novels at the nearby GoldenEye estate — though in the book and in person Blackwell goes no further than describing the two as “the very best of friends.”By the late 1950s, Blackwell was involved in the nascent Jamaican pop business. He supplied records to jukeboxes and the operators of “soundsystems” for outdoor dance parties; “I was pretty much the only one of my complexion there,” he recalled.Soon he began producing records of his own. In 1962, Blackwell moved to London and began licensing ska singles — the bubbly, upbeat predecessor of reggae — which he sold to shops serving Jamaican immigrants out of the back of his Mini Cooper.In 1964, he landed his first hit with “My Boy Lollipop,” a two-minute slice of exquisite skabblegum sung by a Jamaican teenager, Millie Small. The song went to No. 2 in Britain and in the United States, and sold more than six million copies, though Blackwell was aghast at how instant stardom had transformed Millie’s life. Back in Jamaica, her mother seemed to barely recognize Millie, curtsying before her daughter as if she was visiting royalty. “What had I done?” Blackwell wrote. He swore to no longer chase pop hits as a goal in itself.“The Islander,” which arrived on Tuesday, makes a case for the record label boss not as a domineering captain but as an enabler of serendipity. Shortly after his success with Millie, Blackwell saw the Spencer Davis Group, whose singer, the teenage Steve Winwood, “sounded like Ray Charles on helium.” In 1967, Blackwell rented a cottage for Winwood’s next band, Traffic, to jam, and seemed content to just see what they came up with there.“It wasn’t about Chris Blackwell making a hit record or something,” Blackwell said. “It was really trying to uplift the artists.”Daniel Weiss for The New York TimesA little over a decade later, Blackwell put Jones together with the house band at Compass Point, the studio he built in the Bahamas. Jones said the results made her a better artist.“I found my voice working with Chris,” she said in an interview. “He allowed me to be myself, and extend myself, in a way, by putting me together with musicians. It was an experiment, but it really worked.”When U2 began working on its fourth album, “The Unforgettable Fire,” the band wanted to hire Brian Eno as a producer. Blackwell, thinking of Eno an avant-gardist, opposed the idea. But after talking to Bono and the Edge about it, Blackwell accepted their decision. Eno and Daniel Lanois produced “The Unforgettable Fire” and its follow-up, “The Joshua Tree,” which established U2 as global superstars.“When he understood the band’s desire to develop and grow, to access other colors and moods,” Bono added, “he got out of the way of a relationship that turned out to be crucial for us. The story reveals more on the depth of Chris’s commitment to serve us and not the other way around. There was no bullying ever.”BLACKWELL’S MOST FASCINATING artist relationship was with Marley, where he used a heavier hand and had an even greater impact.Although Island had distributed 1960s singles by the Wailers, Marley’s band with Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, Blackwell did not meet them until 1972, after the group finished a British tour but needed money to return to Jamaica. He was immediately struck by their presence. “When they entered they didn’t look broken down,” he said. “They looked like kings.”Yet Blackwell advised them that to get played on the radio, they needed to present themselves not as a simple reggae band but as a “Black rock act,” and go after “college kids” (code for a middle-class white audience). Blackwell recalls that Livingston and Tosh were skeptical but Marley was intrigued. The three recorded the basic tracks for their next album in Jamaica, but Blackwell and Marley then reworked the tapes in London — bringing in white session players like the guitarist Wayne Perkins and the keyboardist John Bundrick.The resulting album, “Catch a Fire,” was the most sophisticated-sounding reggae release of its time, though it also kicked off a debate that continues today: How much was Marley’s sound and image shaped by Blackwell and Island for the sake of a white crossover? That question comes into bolder relief when Blackwell recounts the origins of “Legend,” the hits compilation that Island released in 1984, three years after Marley died.In the book, Blackwell writes that he gave the job to Dave Robinson of Stiff Records, who came to work at Island after Blackwell made a deal with Stiff. Robinson, surprised by the low sales of Marley’s catalog, targeted the mainstream white audience. That meant refining the track list to favor uplifting songs and limit his more confrontational political music. Marketing for the album, which included a video featuring Paul McCartney, downplayed the word “reggae.”It worked: “Legend” became one of most successful albums of all time, selling 27 million copies around the world, according to Blackwell. And it did not erase Marley’s legacy as a revolutionary.From left: Junior Marvin, Bob Marley, Jacob Miller and Blackwell in 1980.Nathalie DelonMarley’s daughter Cedella, who runs the family business as the chief executive of the Bob Marley Group of Companies, had no complaints. “You can’t regret ‘Legend,’” she said in an interview. “And if you want to listen to the loving Bob, the revolutionary Bob, the playful Bob — it’s all there.”Throughout “The Islander,” Blackwell drops astonishing asides. He passed on signing Pink Floyd, he writes, “because they seemed too boring,” and Madonna “because I couldn’t work out what on earth I could do for her.”Still, it is sometimes puzzling what Blackwell omits or plays down. Despite the centrality of reggae to Island’s story, giants of the genre like Black Uhuru and Steel Pulse are mentioned only briefly. Blackwell writes about former wives and girlfriends but not his two sons.Even those who might take offense still seem in awe. Dickie Jobson, a friend and associate who directed the 1982 film “Countryman,” about a man who embodied Rastafarianism, gets little ink. “Chris’s best friend in life was my cousin Dickie Jobson, so I was a little disappointed in the book where Dickie is only mentioned three times,” said Wayne Jobson, a producer also known as Native Wayne. “But Chris has a lot of friends,” he said, adding that Blackwell is “a national treasure of Jamaica.”The latter chapters of the book are the most dramatic, where Blackwell recounts how cash-flow shortages — Island couldn’t pay U2’s royalty bill at one point, so Blackwell gave the band 10 percent of the company instead — and bad business decisions led him to sell Island. “I don’t regret it, because I put myself there,” Blackwell said. “I made my own mistakes.”In recent years, having sold most of his music interests, Blackwell has devoted himself to his resort properties in Jamaica, seeing it as his final legacy to promote the country as he would an artist. Each improvement or tweak to GoldenEye, for example, he sees as “remixing.”“If you say it yourself it sounds soppy,” Blackwell said. “But I love Jamaica. I love Jamaican people. Jamaican people looked after me. And I’ve always felt that whatever I can do to help, I would do so.” More