U2 have reimagined and re-recorded 40 of their songs for a new album, Songs of Surrender, which will be out on March 17. The LP is meant as a companion to Bono’s recent memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Check out a trailer for it, which previews a reworked version of ‘Beautiful Day’, below.
U2 teased the record via handwritten photocopied letters sent to select fans. One letter, signed by the Edge, read in part: “The fact is that most of our work was written and recorded when we were a bunch of very young men. Those songs mean something quite different to us now. Some have grown with us. Some we have outgrown, but we have not lost sight of what propelled us to write those songs in the first place.”
The Edge continued to explain that the project “started as an experiment” but quickly became an “obsession as so many early U2 songs yielded to a new interpretation.” He added: “Intimacy replaced post-punk urgency. New keys, new chords, new tempos and new lyrics arrived… Once we surrendered our reverence for the original version, each song started to open up to a new anthemic voice of this time, of the people we are now, and particularly the singer that Bono has become.”
