"With or Without You"

It was Bono who came up with the chords for “With or Without You.”  Inspired by both the combination of darkness and sweetness in the music of Roy Orbison and the agonized passion of the Harry Nilsson hit “Without You,” Bono had written a song to capture the tension he felt between his identity as a rock star and his identity as a husband and eventual family man.

But the problem appeared to be that the tune that cycled repeatedly through the same four chords from beginning to end.  Bono and the rest of U2 gave the number a test flight in an early demo in 1985, but they could never bring the music in for a successful landing.

The consensus was that it was those four chords.  The Edge, Adam, and Larry all felt that the song was trapped in a loop and they couldn’t find their way out.    

Producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois applied their studio magic.  Play it louder.  Try this effect.  Layer in the electronic drums.  Nothing was working.

The realization they came to was that they’d given this song their best shot. And since they still had an album to make, everyone agreed it was time to move on.

Everyone except Bono.

For him, the message of “With or Without You” was too powerful to let go of.  In his recent memoir, he recalled how Harry Nilsson’s climactic chorus, “I can’t live if living is without you” touched him deeply.

So Bono took his discarded tune and played it for a childhood friend who was also a musician and asked him what he thought.

That friend’s assessment, according to Bono, was simple:  “the song peaks too early.  You don’t believe the singer can get to the emotion of that huge chorus so quickly.”

Looking back, his solution seems obvious:  “It’s an arrangement problem, not a song problem.”

And he was so right.  The song needed to build.

Think back to Harry Nilsson’s re-working of that Badfinger tune “Without You.”  It’s a song that traces the same sort of dramatic emotional arc that Bono wanted to travel.  So U2 just needed take a comparable path with their instruments:  begin with a whisper, build gradually in intensity, pull back the reins, and then explode with passion and slowly fade away.