Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders had told Bono he had an amazing voice.

Now they were exploring the liberations that come with constraint. In the past, they’d let their songwriting be loose and in-the-moment-after all, planning would’ve been unpunk.

But the stakes were higher now: They’d already been crowned Band of the ’80s by Rolling Stone (in 1985, no less), and their live shows had become the kind of spectacles that inspired rapture.Īdd to this the anxiety that The Joshua Tree represented something new for the band: the gospel influences, the emotional nakedness, the introduction of understatement to a sound that had defined itself by its forthrightness. He’d had this feeling before, of course-he later said he couldn’t figure out why anyone would even buy a U2 album. Too many mistakes, he thought, too many wrong moves. Shortly before U2 released what became one of the best-selling albums of all time, Bono thought about calling the record-pressing plant to stop production on it.

U2 the joshua tree scene