Because

Here's the rough draft on a piece of writing I'm working on. Okay, sure, it's not a REAL piece of fiction; it's not even an essay. But here it is (hope you enjoy!):

BECAUSE

U2 is my favourite band because.

They don’t contrive. They just make music. They are seriously into it, too – if you saw Edge discussing the different chords they could have used for Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own which didn’t quite feel right, on the DVD that came with the album, and then you saw my brother-in-law unable to tell the difference between the chord sequences, and unable to figure out why it was all so important, even when he played that part over three times, you’d understand. They don’t just slap some words on top of some music. Everything is significant. They stretch the boundaries of effort; they are sitting on a fence that runs along the field of trying-too-hard and the field of not-quite-there.

Their music is not a template. Slow songs, fast songs; happy songs, sad songs; inspirational songs, who-cares songs. There is always a song by U2 that can fit my mood, unless I need utter silence. U2 effortlessly goes right to the extreme of dramatic/melancholy and boomerangs back to ridiculous/pointless. And they’re credible every place they go.

Bono appears to sound like he can’t sing that much better than Joe Bloggs, but then he’s live and an opera singer. Edge’s guitar riff is nice, but then it’s live and it pushes the blood through your veins. You don’t really notice the bass until you hear Adam live and realise how useless the music would be without it. Then you hear Larry drumming in Desire on stage in Boston and wonder how you could ever have not noticed that song.

You have to like U2 by principle as well as by taste. Any band that has been together for so long and continued to make such music, doing it their own way, differently every time, has to be admired. Then there’s the fact that you can’t actually fully understand the ideas behind every song because Bono’s so bloody intelligent he can be unintelligible. You never get some boring, immediately understandable lyric with bad rhyme and dull ideas. I have to admit that one can never know, but it seems to me that they are totally genuine people. Bono especially. Maybe he smokes and drinks and swears, but I feel he’s a lot closer to Jesus, and more willing to go out of his way for Him, than a lot of ‘godly’ people who have never touched a cigarette in their lives.

They make me feel better. On moving house, I was a wreck. Then I heard Walk On. Everything Bono sang felt like it was directed at me, sitting there with a headache from crying too much. They don’t laugh at me for feeling the way I do about things. They change the way I think and live; generally, I hope, this is for the better. They feed me. Perhaps I’m going mad, but I feel like I could tell Bono all my secrets and he might understand some of them. They’re so fun. What other band have I heard of that does cool stuff like coming onto stage in a giant lemon, and what other lead singer can pull off pretending to be a fly or a devil called MacPhisto, then have discussions about third world poverty with George W. Bush?

Sometimes I like them just because I do.