Episode 26: Running To Stand Still b/w Reconciling Bono

All is quiet on New Year’s Day. Except for Bono, of course.

That’s a joke … sort of. Across the globe, thousands of radio stations will play U2 today, and specifically, “New Year’s Day.” And for good reason. The majority of the Northern Hemisphere looks how this song feels on January 1. Overcast. Windswept. Desolate. Coldly comforting. Even when the sun is out, New Year’s Day is grayscale in spirit, and U2’s bittersweet, turbulent comedown song released on January 1, 1983 captures the distinctive soup of emotions the cosmos serves us once a year. Then again, there are countless days over the past two years that have tasted like this.

If “New Year’s Day” isn’t my favorite U2 song, it’s definitely near the top of the short list of U2 songs I can still stand at this point. I can’t say U2 was ever even a top 20 band for me, but I did spend a fair amount of time with them as a teenager, mostly with the first three albums. Like the Police, I initially absorbed U2’s music through osmosis, or rather the walls of my brother, Travis’ bedroom, and the jagged post-punk rhythms and barren sonic landscapes of Boy, October and War still resonate with me. Travis was 14 when War was released in February 1983, and two years later U2 would be his first concert when the band played Richfield Coliseum during the second North American leg of The Unforgettable Fire Tour. Long before U2 became the biggest band in the world, U2 was the biggest band in Travis’ world, and the influence on his fashion style and early spiritual development was evident; it’s safe to say that his relationship with U2 – even if it’s only acquaintances at this point – has made a positive impact on his principled life. I never got that far with U2, and the further I got into adulthood, the more and more Bono bugged the hell out of me, and at a certain point I traded in all of my U2 records because I couldn’t listen to them without seeing Bono in those goofy-ass fly glasses and thinking about what a turd he had become post-Joshua Tree.

Bono’s an easy target, of course. He’s mega-rich and mega-famous, and he got there, through no fault of his own, by being mega-talented. He lampooned megalomaniacs until he turned into one. He and the Edge have two of the worst rock star names in the history of popular music, and it’s only been easier over time to poke holes in the silliness of their personas and audaciousness of their endeavors – especially the Edge, who tried for more than a decade, unsuccessfully, to spearhead what was described as an “environmentally devastating” development of five wretched mansions on a 150-acre bluff in Malibu overlooking the Pacific Ocean. By comparison, partnering with Apple to force-feed 2014’s Songs of Innocence to 500 million iTunes users now feels harmless; it’s cute that U2 thought half a billion people would care or give thanks for this 10-dollar gift, but it still boils my potatoes that I could never figure out how to scrub the damn thing from my account. Maybe I’d feel differently if Songs of Innocence were guilty of being good, but for the past 20 years, U2 could be fairly characterized as a band that’s very aware of its importance making increasingly less important music. The mega-fans, of course, could care less – every new album is deemed an instant classic because objectivity does not exist in pure fandom – but there’s a sense among critics and casual listeners like me that these four lads from Dublin are content to rest on the laurels of their legacy and put more energy into pet projects and business deals than turning universal human truths into deep, shimmering pop songs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about loyalty lately, which is either the byproduct of our cross-country move back to my home land or simply my age. Or both. Specifically, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own loyalty (or lack thereof) to everything and anything in my life – be it a person, place or thing like a band – while I run. Running has been a lifeline for me during the pandemic. It was a big part of my routine before the shutdown, but since March 2020 I’ve logged more miles and worn out more sneakers than any other time in my life, and in the process I’ve shed a dogpile of figurative and literal skin. I didn’t find running until I was 24, and only as an escape hatch. I had just quit my first newspaper job out of college and took a ferry boat from Portland, Maine, to Nova Scotia for a five-week French language immersion program at Université Sainte-Anne in Church Point. At the start of the five weeks, students were required to sign a document stating they would only speak French for the duration of the program – in the classroom, in the dorms, everywhere on campus – and I walked into this with next to no knowledge or understanding of the language. I certainly could not speak it, and signing that pledge effectively tied my tongue. Those first two weeks of the program were among the most challenging and frustrating of my life. I’d reach a point each day where I was mentally and emotionally fried, and I needed to get away from everyone and everything, so I ran. I didn’t run away, but I ran. And ran. And ran some more. Through the small campus, along the jagged bluff overlooking St. Mary’s Bay, anywhere my feet would take me as long as I could find my way back without a map. I used this time to burrow into my English-speaking brain, burn off the stress, sort out the problems, reset and return. And it always worked. Twenty years later, it still works. Every time. As I progressed into my late 20s and early 30s, life got shakier – the stakes higher, the problems deeper – but running proved to be a reliable pill. I have run from people, I have run from places, I have run from things. I have run from demons, desires and dilemmas. But I always come back, and I come back standing on firmer ground and in a better frame of mind than I was before I laced up my Sauconys.

I share with Bono, like many listeners who have gravitated to U2, a certain restlessness of spirit. It’s there with me as I jog above the lonely turnpike wind tunnel on a weekday winter afternoon, looking west and thinking about Boise and the odd duality of our day-to-day life in Hudson. It’s there when I’m running through a sun-speckled thicket on a summer’s day, wondering if I am on the chase or the one being chased – if I’m Alice or the rabbit, or both. And it’s there as my feet crunch the autumn leaves on a trail, searching for a deeper understanding of my path on approach to 45. In the past year, I’ve purchased secondhand cassettes of The Joshua Tree and War and listened to them frequently while driving in the truck. War, in particular, has been on heavy rotation lately – it suits the season and the bare-branches state of mind that accompanies it. These purchases were, in effect, a way for me to give Bono a second chance, to reconsider my stance as I soften on things like stances, and I relearned how to love these albums by taking them for what they are, on their own, without allowing my standalone enjoyment to be colored by what came later. To a certain extent, we all become caricatures of ourselves. Our passions and personas come to identify us, we get stuck in our ruts and take a few missteps, people get sick of our shit. Or we get sick of our own shit. Or both.

A few days ago, my wife, Erica, shared with me a quote from psychology writer Heidi Priebe that says, “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never end up growing into. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.” I can’t say I ever loved Bono, but listening to War and The Joshua Tree here in middle age as a much different person than I was at 15, I can hold a wake for the versions of Bono he used to be, and the versions I used to be, and call it a beautiful day.

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