U2 are having such a good time recording their new album that they are not going to stop, Bono has announced on their website. The group have already racked up "fifty or sixty" new songs but they are keeping at it. "We said to each other that if we got to the great place then we wouldn't stop," he said.
With 50 or 60 tracks already recorded, it seems U2's follow-up to 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb will carry either the creamiest crème de la crème, or else it's going to be a very long – and presumably mediocre – record.
Bono clearly hopes for the former. "We have what it takes," he said in his message. "This is our chance for us to defy gravity once again ... We have the songs, new rhythms and a guitar player who is not ready to re-enter earth's atmosphere until he's taken a slice of the moon!"
Changing metaphorical tacks, Bono compared the recording process to digging in a mine. "We've hit a rich songwriting vein," he said. "It gets a bit dark down here but looks like we've found diamonds not coal. I thought a while back we might have the album wrapped by now, but why come up above ground now if there's more priceless stuff to be found? We know we have to emerge soon but we also know that people don't want another U2 album unless it is our best ever album."
Though the album was originally promised for late 2008, the extent of their musical mining expedition has pushed the release back to 2009.
"I'm always the one who underestimates how easy it is to simply 'put out the songs now,'" Bono said. "If it was just up to me they'd be out already! But early next year people will be able to start hearing what we've been doing. We want 2009 to be our year, so we're going to start making an impression very early on."
Producers Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite have all been on hand for portions of the sessions, which took place in Dublin, Morocco and the south of France. Bono raved about the Morocco sessions, at an open-air studio, where the "beautiful ... sound of a swallow's nest close to the building" made it on to the tape. Apparently, U2 couldn't afford proper soundproofing.
Bono sounds invigorated, however. "Everyone we've played the tracks to has said that musically it feels like another departure," he emphasised. "The last two records were very personal, with a kind of three-piece at their heart, the primary colours of rock - bass, guitars and drum. But what we're about now is of the same order as the transition that took us from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby."
Let's hope when they again put the colours of rock together, it doesn't come out some messy shade of brown.
