January 5th, 2022 3:13am
The Day Is As Dark As The Night Is Long
U2 “Ultra Violet (Light My Way)”
Bono is a hopeless romantic, which serves him well when writing love songs and even better when he wants to tell his own story. “Ultra Violet” is a bit of both, an ode to his wife Ali that starts before there was a Bono or U2, when he was just a broke guy called Paul in a room with one dangling light bulb hanging over his bed. It’s an incredible image, so economical in evoking both squalor and distant hope that the band would recycle it as central visual iconography for the autobiographical narrative played out on their Innocence + Experience tours. In that context it’s a theatrical element that’s unabashedly sentimental but in “Ultra Violet” it’s a matter of setting the stakes – “when I was all messed up and I had opera in my head, your love was a light bulb hanging over my bed.” This is basically Bono’s way of saying she’s his day one, his ride or die.
But there’s more to “Ultra Violet” than simply saying this woman has been his guiding light since before he was anyone. The lines I’m quoting are from the climax of the song and the lyrics start off in a moment of severe crisis in the present before moving backwards in time to that foundation of pure love. The opening verse, which is sung nearly a cappella before The Edge’s guitar riff kicks in, is about as abject as Bono ever gets in his music. This is a distinctly non-suicidal type of guy in a “I don’t even want to be around anymore” moment. He admits that he cannot always be strong, which is totally fine. He then tells her that he needs her to be strong, which is hypocritical but emotionally honest in a song that’s essentially about depending on someone in your lowest moments.
There are other tensions in the song, matters of secrets and lies and whisper and moans, the sort of things that bring “silence to a house where no one can sleep.” He’s setting dramatic stakes but also acknowledging the complications and clashes and detentes of long-running adult relationships. Bono was very good at this in his prime, grounding his most earnest yearnings in the grime and grit of a real life.
The Edge’s guitar in “Ultra Violet” sounds as though he’s trying to play a Motown-ish funk rhythm but somehow getting closer to the sound of church bells. Everything that should signal something earthy and groovy gets shifted into more spiritual and orchestral sort of drama – Larry Mullen Jr’s drums pound like timpani, Adam Clayton’s bass drones more like a cello. They arrive at a similar aesthetic on “Until the End of the World,” this music that’s technically quite jaunty but conveys none of the mood you’d typically associate with that word. But you hear this music, this piece that conveys an odd holiness and bright ambiance, and it’s not hard to get how Bono got to where he did lyrically from that starting point.
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