The U2X channel on SiriusXM often features listeners describing their individual playlists of five U2 songs—the U2 songs I desire the most. As the guest deejay tees up each song, we hear about loved ones, memorable U2 concerts, life and career milestones, and other short anecdotes about what the song means to the person.
I’ve been a fan of U2 since I was in high school, and here are the songs I would play:
Here’s why:
The first U2 album I bought, on cassette tape in DeKalb in 1987, was The Joshua Tree. My cousin had lent me his yellow Sony Walkman, but I had used my summer money to buy an AIWA personal music device and so most likely listened to the cassette first on that. A couple days a week, after walking the soybean fields, I would drive my big old car to a soccer field on the campus of Northern Illinois University. I arrived early for the pick-up game, so I would sit in the car with the windows down, listening through headphones to that album. Where the Streets Have No Name was my favorite song. It was a nice interlude between work and play. When my teammates and friends arrived, I’d join them on the pitch. To this day, I remember a goal I scored on a long cross from the sideline, the arc of the shot merged with the remembered sounds of that U2 song.
I worked as a new student orientation advisor over two summers during college at John Carroll University. One of those summers, my friends and I watched the U2 concert movie Rattle and Hum multiple times. The Harlem scenes and the gospel rendition of Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For were alway good, but I most liked Silver and Gold, especially when Bono starts to lecture the audience about political and racial equality and then catches himself and says, “Am I buggin’ you? I don’t mean to bug ya.” My friends and I were committed to peace and justice; two of them would serve in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and I’d eventually join the U.S. Peace Corps. (The newsweeklies at the time were running cover stories asking if Generation X cared about anything. That fuckin’ bugged me.) When we weren’t welcoming new students or rewatching Rattle and Hum, I was watching the World Cup.
I graduated college, deferred my Peace Corps application, and moved to Honolulu. One day after work I walked to the bookstore in nearby Ala Moana Mall, where I purchased my very first issue of the New Yorker magazine. This issue was devoted entirely to a single long feature story about the 1981 massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador. At JCU, I had studied liberation theology, learned about the life and death of Archbishop Óscar Romero, and read dense, intense novels in a class called Latin American Dictators in Literature. So Mark Danner’s investigation about El Mozote held my attention. I’m sure I listened to U2’s Mothers of the Disappeared, a sombre song about killings by dictatorial regimes, at least a few times during the week it took me to read the article. (Often after listening to this U2 song, I’ll listen to these other songs that are in the family: Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, and both Fathers Footsteps and Mother by Rhythm Corps.)
After college, and Hawaii, and Peace Corps service with my wife, Erin, in the Republic of Vanuatu, we landed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with an infant daughter. Erin was in graduate school, so during that first year little Anna and I explored campus on foot and took drives around the Piedmont. Anna did not like being in the car seat and she screamed her discomfort. I discovered that she’d go quiet when I played “Down in the River to Pray” from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. We listened to that song more times than I’d watched Rattle and Hum, and when even Alison Krauss couldn’t get Anna to calm down, I’d play Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of but I’d change the words:
“You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a car seat
And now you can’t get out of it
Don’t say that later will be better
Now you’re stuck in a car seat
And you can’t get out of it.”
Anna grew out of the car seat, grew up to be an amazing young woman, and she doesn’t seem to hold that loving taunt against me.
For Christmas 2023, Erin gave me the perfect gift—U2’s four-song Wide Awake in America on vinyl, which she found in an antiques shop in nearby Pittsboro. I had purchased a turntable, stereo receiver, and good speakers soon after we moved into our new house, and we’d begun to build a record collection. This gift from Erin included Bad, song that I hadn’t really paid attention to in the decades I’ve followed U2. But in the last couple of years, whenever U2X plays the song, I turn up the volume and sing along. I’ve also rewatched the 1985 U2 performance at Live Aid in which they sang Bad. I watched much of that epic concert on the television in the basement of my aunt’s house, though I’m not certain I saw the U2 set.
So those are the five U2 songs I’d play on the radio if given the chance.
And if you happen to visit me here in Chapel Hill, I’d play a few bonus U2 songs: Grace; Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around the World; The Wanderer; and 13 (There Is a Light). I’d close out our session with a record by Josh Ritter and a listen to his gentle song, A Certain Light.
U2 has been a constant in my life for nearly 40 years and I’ll keep listening as long as I can. (Another constant: soccer.)
© Anton Zuiker