With Or Without You
Michael Brook built a guitar whose notes never decay.
A custom instrument fitted with a sustain device, so that a single note rings on and on, past the place where any natural sound would have died. They called it the Infinite Guitar. It was new technology in 1987, and The Edge ran it through the whole of “With or Without You” — that shimmering drone under everything, a sound most people have heard a thousand times without ever knowing what it was. It is a note that refuses to end. Hold that. The song is built on it.
Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno produced The Joshua Tree at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin and at Danesmoate House, an eighteenth-century mansion in the mountains south of the city. The band recorded through the winter of 1986, and this song almost didn’t make the record. Bono hated it. He thought it was too simple, too exposed. It was Adam Clayton who argued for keeping it — quietly, from behind his bass line, which is the actual spine of the track. Four notes, cycling, patient, going nowhere because they have nowhere to go.
The drum machine at the start is Larry Mullen Jr. stripped back to almost nothing. Lanois and Eno understood that anything heavier would have crushed that bass line, so they left the space empty. The production is so sparse it sounds like breath. And inside that space, the Infinite Guitar holds its note.
Here is what the song is about, as plainly as I can say it.
A man is caught between two things — wanting and leaving, a love he can’t be inside of and can’t get outside of. And the part that still stops me is where he puts the blame. “Through the storm we reach the shore, you give it all but I want more.” She gives it all. He wants more. The wanting is his problem, and he says so. Most rock songs about a hard love make the singer sympathetic by making the other person the obstacle. This one doesn’t. He lands it on himself, on a hunger he can’t control, on the way love can make you worse before it makes you better. The song doesn’t promise it makes you better.
That is also why the song never resolves. Bono holds the line — and you give yourself away — and the band keeps building underneath him, and the release you’re waiting for never arrives. It can’t. The man in the song is stuck, and a resolution would be a lie about him. The track is honest enough to withhold it.
And under all of it, the whole way through, that note is still ringing.
The Joshua Tree came out in March of 1987. “With or Without You” was the first single and the band’s first number one, the song that broke America open for them, and within weeks U2 were the biggest band in the world — not just popular but everywhere, the kind of ubiquity that stops feeling like commerce and starts feeling like weather. A song about being stuck did that.
Phil Joanou filmed the band performing it for the Rattle and Hum concert film, in the sun in Tempe, Arizona, in front of eighty thousand people who sang every word back at them. Private anguish at stadium size. Four men who were, at that moment, about as free as anyone on earth, singing a song about a man who can’t get free. The crowd didn’t need to be trapped by anything to sing that line like they meant it. The song traveled because the feeling does. Almost everyone has stood in some version of that doorway, unable to stay and unable to go, and the song doesn’t tell you which way to walk. It just stands there with you.
So go back to the instrument.
Brook built a guitar that holds a note without decay, and The Edge put it under a song about a feeling that won’t let go. The technology and the subject are the same thing. Every other sound on the record fades the way sounds are supposed to fade. This one doesn’t.
That’s the song. A note that should have died a long time ago, still ringing.
