To create “Ordinary Love,” U2 characteristically obsessed and tinkered and faltered. “We had three or four goes at it to get it right,” Bono says. “The lyrics changed course for me after reading his love letters to Winnie. Maybe the reason they asked us was to do a kind of ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’ moment, but it just did not seem correct. The only place in his life he felt that he was the loser in the conflict, that his enemies had prevailed, was in his marriage. He just couldn’t make that work, and the most important part of that film is the love story.”
Says Weinstein, “Edge is as tough on the music as anybody I’ve ever seen. We didn’t have the song in time for the Toronto Film Festival screening [in September]. They will perfect the song, and deadlines be damned. And it’s not because they’re being difficult about it-it’s just that they really want to make things right.”
The question of how badly the “Ordinary Love” detour slowed forward momentum on the still-unnamed and now long-overdue next album is not easy to answer from outside U2’s opaque inner circle, but the distractions were compounded by promotion duties for the film, the pause to mourn Mandela’s death and the nominations hoopla. The band’s track record in the studio is replete with evidence that U2 is perfectly capable of languishing there without needing outside help. (Bono has been joking that the working title of the album-in-progress is Insecurity.) As always with U2, reports and rumors swirl about producers and collaborators coming and going: Danger Mouse (the stage name of Brian Burton), Paul Epworth, Ryan Tedder…
“We’ve always needed collaborators to challenge us,” Mullen says. “We’re slow learners. We need to be creative, on the cutting edge, challenged, and it’s really hard going, it’s relentless, and we’re relentless, and we have a history of breaking engineers, producers. I mean, people come out of working with U2 and just go, ‘I just don’t know what’s happened; it feels like a lifetime has passed by.’ And that’s just the way we work.”
Adds Bono, “The album won’t be ready till it’s ready. But right now, people are walking a little differently-well, they’re not walking, they’re running as if to a finish line. There’s a couple of songs that are part of the story we haven’t quite finished. We know we have to spend a couple of years taking these songs around the world, so they’d better be good.”