I like how it comes with so much stuff aside from the CD. The lithographs are amazing, the bookmarks are incredible, and FTGU is in itself a treasure. Totally worth resubscribing this year.
And for any other subscribers anxiously waiting for their gift, mine came in a box roughly the same size of the U22 envelope (but thicker, obviously), so it won't fit in most mailboxes.
Right now I'm giving the CD a fresh listen using the given tracklist. Then, I'll proceed to design a "360 Tour" tracklist using the various things we've been given. I'm limiting my setlist to 40 songs because that's a much nicer number than 43 and all my other ordered playlists are 40 songs.
Somewhere while I'm doing that, I'll finish my graduate school applications so I won't be stuck up a creek when June comes along.
The CD is astounding. Songs that I felt iffy about sounded amazing! Breathe was actually one of my favorites. Stuck sounded great in spite of my initial dislike of the acoustic version. Boots is awesome as well. Your blue room stole the show, IMO. I was getting the same feeling of awe from it as I did from zooropa. Sunday bloody Sunday had a sound that I had never heard from that song before. That drum sound was amazing. From a sound perspective, the CD is great. From performance standpoint, miss Sarajevo and 40 were low points IMO.
At the end of the day, I think only a couple songs from the CD will make the cut to my general playlist (1 live performance per song).
1. Breathe
2. I Will Follow
3. Get On Your Boots
4. Unknown Caller
5. Desire
6. Elevation
7. Until The End Of The World
8. Stay
9. Beautiful Day
10. New Year's Day
11. One Tree Hill
12. Stuck
13. I Still Haven't Found
14. Electrical Storm
15. All I Want Is You
16. Magnificent
17. No Line On The Horizon
18. Mysterious Ways
19. Your Blue Room
20. In A Little While
21. Miss Sarajevo
22. The Unforgettable Fire
23. Zooropa
24. City Of Blinding Lights
25. Vertigo
26. I'll Go Crazy
27. Sunday Bloody Sunday
28. Bad
29. One
30. Streets
31. Pride
32. Walk On
33. Even Better
34. The Fly
35. Hold Me
36. Ultra Violet
37. With Or Without You
38. Moment Of Surrender
39. Out Of Control
40. 40
Songs dropped:
- Spanish Eyes: Too much Bono fumbling for my liking, unfortunately
- Mercy (from Wide Awake): The sound doesn't match the U22/Edge's Picks mixing, so it just felt awkward
- Scarlet: Waste of a track, imo. It also doesn't really work with Bono and his MLK speech on the same playlist.
General notes:
The first half of the playlist was intended to feel a lot like 360 as it was first imagined. Breathe starts things off along with several songs you would expect to hear at the beginning of a show. The order was kind of based off the general feel of things. I didn't want to lump all the acoustic and slow songs together because that would make the set feel really dry and slow during those parts.
From In A Little While down, the setlist pretty much follows the structure of a gig at that point. The main surprise is Bad showing up between Sunday Bloody Sunday and One. I think Bad works well here because it's a good sustain for the energy coming off of SBS and ties into One nicely.
I use Even Better to open up the "encore" section of the set because, as a show opener, it has an extremely long intro and buildup that doesn't really work anywhere else aside from being an opener. Walk On has a nice sense of closure, so putting Even Better after makes sense. The Fly had to come next because Even Better needs a strong follow up. This leads nicely to the intro of HMTMKMKM and the rest of the encore is business as usual.
I'm actually pretty happy with the way this playlist works, so I might end up keeping it even though I initially made it just for fun.
Nice...are you using a program to make "seamless" transitions? I plan to do that but I might wait a bit (once I have FTGU) as I don't want to do all that work and then "Mothers..." or "Angel...." gets released afterwards.
