Songs Of Experience - General album discussions

Originally posted by kris_smith87:[..]


I think people confuse theme with sound. I keep going back to Beyoncé’s Lemonade and how it had a cohesive theme yet each song sounded different.

Originally posted by LikeASong:[..]
I don't give a damn about Beyonce, I don't know her discography and I don't know how that album compares to the rest of it, I'm talking about U2 here. Many U2 albums have a cohesive theme with their songs sounding totally different (how different is Drowning Man from Surrender, Red Light from New Year's Day? How different is So Cruel from The Fly and Acrobat from One?), while others have a cohesive sound but don't have a theme (let's take the Zooropa album as an example: it's a great collection of fantastic songs but it doesn't tell any story all throughout). But that's not the case here.

They tried to sell "Songs Of Innocence And Experience" as a back-to-back pair, as a juxtaposed tandem of opposite stories - and it just doesn't work because SOE feels like a collection of songs instead of a story (which, on the other hand, SOI does). The sound doesn't matter here, it's the feel of the songs, the flow of the tracklist, the thread that ties (or should tie) all the songs together even if they feel and sound different, like all the songs from Achtung Baby or Pop. That feel, that binding thread is not present on SOE and if you fail to see it and prefer to think it is, then all the better for you. The lack of theme cohesion does NOT make SOE a bad album – it just makes the whole "SOI&E" concept fail.

Originally posted by kris_smith87:[..]
So because you can’t see it it isn’t there and I’m failing to see it? Right. Ok.

One thing I’ve taken from this album is how “stuck” (in a moment... sorry) U2 fans seem to be. They want the band to be different, but work with multiple producers on one project and they have committed treason for example. Just because it doesn’t happen so much in rock doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. This is an example of U2 not being boxed into a certain genre or way of doing things.

You also mentioned the lack of tying SOI and SOE together yet there are literal callbacks to SOI which had people grabbing their torches and pitchforks here.

Where SOI told a story SOE tells of an epiphany: all we need is Love. It is easy to tell a story of your early days but harder to tell a story about the things you experienced without it being just a general album since wouldn’t most songs written by the band be about their experiences? (Unless you think about the songs on No Line which Bono took on characters and oh wait, that got people pissy too.)

We’ve heard it in several interviews that what Bono realized was that all you need is Love and the people closest to you when the world is falling apart. I think that sounds like someone who has quite a lot of Experience.

Originally posted by LikeASong:[..]
I don't give a damn about Beyonce, I don't know her discography and I don't know how that album compares to the rest of it, I'm talking about U2 here. Many U2 albums have a cohesive theme with their songs sounding totally different (how different is Drowning Man from Surrender, Red Light from New Year's Day? How different is So Cruel from The Fly and Acrobat from One?), while others have a cohesive sound but don't have a theme (let's take the Zooropa album as an example: it's a great collection of fantastic songs but it doesn't tell any story all throughout). But that's not the case here.

They tried to sell "Songs Of Innocence And Experience" as a back-to-back pair, as a juxtaposed tandem of opposite stories - and it just doesn't work because SOE feels like a collection of songs instead of a story (which, on the other hand, SOI does). The sound doesn't matter here, it's the feel of the songs, the flow of the tracklist, the thread that ties (or should tie) all the songs together even if they feel and sound different, like all the songs from Achtung Baby or Pop. That feel, that binding thread is not present on SOE and if you fail to see it and prefer to think it is, then all the better for you. The lack of theme cohesion does NOT make SOE a bad album – it just makes the whole "SOI&E" concept fail.

Originally posted by deanallison:My very simple way of looking at it is SOE is about experience(s) and what they have taught you or maybe what you’re still learning from them.

Originally posted by RattleandHum1988:[..]
I gotta say I disagree, and I think it stems from taking Bono's continuing statement that many of these songs are letters. While you can look at this album as a collection of songs, to me it's the collection itself that's cohesive. I listen to the album and hear a collection of songs that all stem from the same originating point, which is Bono's "brush with mortality". To me the album opens like Bono is having an out-of-body experience, and then he comes back to life in Lights of Home. The rest of the songs thereafter are either the "letters", or songs like Little Things or Blackout which is him remarking on himself briefly. I think this album is TOTALLY cohesive. SoI feels just as much a collection of songs as this one does IMO. One tells a story, the other tells the lessons learned by it. If they are all the same lesson it would be boring.

As someone who really likes SoI, I also think SoE craps all over it in terms of songs that really feel emotional, and like they mean them and were inspired when they wrote them (Iris might be the exception). SoI feels very paint-by-numbers or something to me. There's no atmosphere to that record at all. There are hints at one (chorus of California), but that's about it.