The Joshua Tree
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Joshua Tree | ||
 |
||
| Studio album by U2 | ||
| Released | March 9, 1987 | |
| Recorded | Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin July - November 1986 | |
| Genre | Rock | |
| Length | 50:11 | |
| Label | Island Records | |
| Producer(s) | Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois | |
| Professional reviews | ||
|---|---|---|
| U2 chronology | ||
| Wide Awake in America (1985) |
The Joshua Tree (1987) |
Rattle and Hum (1988) |
| Alternate Cover | ||
 |
||
| Non-remastered CD cover
|
||
The Joshua Tree is the fifth studio album by Irish rock band U2, released on March 9, 1987 on Island Records. It was produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. The album was massively successful, and is considered to have been U2's worldwide commercial breakthrough. In addition, it has often been praised by music critics as the band's best album and one of the best rock albums of all time. The album earned number 26 on Rolling Stones 500 greatest albums of all time list. The Joshua Tree won the Album of the Year award at the Grammy Awards of 1988.
Contents |
[edit] History
According to Rene Tinner and Stefan Plank in a radio documentary about the life of German Producer Conny Plank, it was Brian Eno's idea, that Plank should produce the album instead of him. After being introduced to the band by Eno and after a short meeting, Plank turned down the job ("I cannot work with this singer").[1]
The album continues the sonic experimentation of The Unforgettable Fire. The album opener, "Where the Streets Have No Name", begins with a soft organ fade-in (appropriately similar to the end of "MLK" from Unforgettable Fire) over which guitarist The Edge plays a simple echo-laden arpeggio, ringing each note out twice, an elegant effect that gives the band a deceptively detailed sound. "With or Without You", the album's first single and one of the band's most well-known songs, uses a technique called "infinite guitar", developed by Michael Brook, to distort the notes into an eerie wail.
Joshua Tree picks up where the political themes of War left off. "Bullet the Blue Sky" is a fierce attack on the United States' policy of supporting the right wing government of El Salvador, with a martial drum beat, thundering bassline, and wailing guitar reminiscent of falling bombs. Lead singer Bono reportedly told Edge to "put El Salvador through your amplifier." "Mothers of the Disappeared" is an understated lament for the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the thousands of los desaparecidos (from Spanish, literally "the disappeared")—people who opposed the military government of Videla and Galtieri in Argentina and who were kidnapped and never seen again.
In addition to the political matter, there are many personal songs, including "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", a song about Bono's inner struggles with faith and temptation, and "One Tree Hill", an elegy written for Bono's friend and personal assistant, Greg Carroll (to whom the album is dedicated), who died in 1986.
Musically, the band began to incorporate American folk and blues influences into their songwriting, most evident on "Running to Stand Still", a rustic ballad about heroin addiction, and "Trip Through Your Wires", a harmonica-filled blues romp. Rattle and Hum (1988) would examine these influences in greater depth.
The Joshua Tree is not only widely considered one of the band's best albums, it is often considered one of the greatest albums ever recorded. In 1989, it was rated #3 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s, as well as appearing at #26 on the magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The Joshua Tree was selected as #6 on CCM Magazine's 2001 list of the greatest Contemporary Christian music albums of all time (see CCM Presents: The 100 Greatest Albums in Christian Music). It came second place in Channel 4's 100 Greatest albums. It came in at #10 in ABC-TV's My Favourite Album, which aired in Australia in December 2006.
The album has sold over 10 million copies in the United States alone and remains the band's best-selling album. It was followed by the successful worldwide Joshua Tree Tour.
The videos "With or Without You" and "Where the Streets Have No Name" (directed by Meiert Avis) and "I Still Haven't Found what I'm Looking For" (directed by Barry Devlin) saturated MTV, making the band much more visible to both casual music listeners and fans.
[edit] Themes
 |
This article or section may contain original research or unattributed claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details. This article has been tagged since 10 Feb 2007. |
[edit] Water and Desert
Numerous aspects of the album emphasize water and the desert. To begin with, the cover photograph is a black-and-white photo of the band at Death Valley National Park in the desert of California [2], taken by the band's longtime photographer Anton Corbijn; then there is the title of the album, which harkens to the California desert's Joshua Tree. Throughout the album, there are numerous explicit lyrical references to water and desert. Specifically, there are 46 references to the words rain, raining, rainin', rainfall, flood, water, well, sea, ocean, and river. Also, there are 17 references to desert, dry, plain, heat, dust, sunlight, and the sun. Water and desert, poetic equivalents of life and death, loss and redemption, and other diametrically opposed but uniquely linked forces, are thus used for a variety of purposes (which are further explained later):
- Reconciling Greg Carroll's death;
- Analogizing the duality of American spirit and its oft-ruthless foreign policy;
- Setting a tone of the American Southwest, providing a cinematic backdrop for the music - as Bono has said, a canvas on which to paint; and
- Creating tone of rusticism, purity, earthiness, piety, rootsiness, and complementing the bluesy/country vibe.
[edit] America
In the initial Joshua Tree writing sessions, the band began mentioning books they were reading at the time—short stories by Raymond Carver, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, and others—as well as talking about the idea of America and what it means. They also talked in detail with producer Brian Eno about the idea of music as cinematic - that music can evoke a location in the listener's mind - and began to place the setting for many of their musical explorations on this album in America's desert southwest. What is more, the band was beginning to investigate America's musical traditions, such as blues, gospel, soul, rhythm and blues, and country music, genres they felt they had ignored up to that point in their lives. From these initial forays into all things American (its music, literature, and geography), the band realized it had decidedly contradictory feelings about the country. They at once found it liberating and oppressive. Liberating as an idea and perhaps a place to live, but oppressive in its power, influence, and controversial foreign policy. A draft title to the album was The Two Americas, influenced by this fascination and deep skepticism with America, and also by Bono's trip to El Salvador where he witnessed American-backed bombings.
[edit] Loss
Many of the songs have a pronounced ache to them. Bono has commented that the album abounds with the ache of the Irish, but not in obvious ways. A cursory review of the general, explicit content of all of the songs reveals that each song generally deals with the notion of loss or absence, be it a person, place, or thing. Bono's lyrics, notoriously ambiguous, contribute to this feeling of absence of something. Album co-producer Daniel Lanois has also said that Bono sings at the top of his range on much of the album--a characteristic the Quebecois says is emotionally compelling and very "Aretha Franklin-like"--and it is quite noticeable that Bono's vocals are huskier and have slowed down compared to earlier albums. In essence, Bono's talents coalesce on this album. What is more, one of The Edge's stylistic troupes is to avoid playing the third of each chord. The third is what gives each chord its gender (major or minor sound), and without it there is a feeling of uncertainty, ambiguity, and absence. As well, the rhythm section's subtlety creates a blank slate of a musical statement. Each of these aspects of the band's sound--Bono's ambiguous lyrics and belting vocals, Edge's tenuous and ethereal playing, and Adam and Larry's austere rhythm section create an emotionally irresolute landscape rife with mystery, ambiguity, and uncertainty. And as most listeners have noted, there is a highness to these songs, a soaring, anthemic, grand quality--the same quality that became the root of most criticism the band endured after they released and toured for this album.
[edit] Greg Carroll
Greg Carroll was Bono's personal assistant and close friend, and can be seen in videos during the European portion of the Unforgettable Fire Tour, in the video to "Bad", and figures prominently on the band's Live Aid set. Carroll was a Māori from New Zealand the band met while kicking off that tour, and was invited to join the band's touring entourage. After the tour, Carroll relocated to Ireland and assisted the band during the recording of the album. Carroll was killed in a motorcycle accident when he was running errands for the band. Carroll's death is yet another event or emotion from which the music takes its sonic ancestry. The album is dedicated to the memory of Greg Carroll.
[edit] The Joshua Tree
Crystallizing this musical journey, as the band jokingly says in the film Rattle and Hum, the album name The Joshua Tree is not without meaning. The Hebrew name יְהוֹשֻׁעַ Joshua, first encountered as the name of Moses' successor as leader of the Israelites becomes, when transliterated into Greek, Ἰησοῦς Jesus, which provides a specifically Christian context for the album content. These images resonate with the themes of the album by evoking an image of a man suffering a great loss or making a great sacrifice, and either calling on something greater for assistance, or simply drawing on catharsis to reconcile what has been lost.
As for the tree itself, the Joshua Tree was named by Mormons traveling through the region, parts of which later became the Joshua Tree National Park. They named the tree because of its outstretched arms - in the Old Testament, Joshua, leading the Hebrews in their follow-up victory at Ai, hanged their king on a tree until sunset.
The original tree on the cover photos died in the year 2000.[citation needed]
[edit] Summary
Each of these major themes can be viewed independently of or interconnected with one another. At the smallest level, the album deals with reconciling the death of Bono's close friend, Greg Carroll. At a larger level, the album both implicitly and explicitly praises and criticizes America as an idea and tyrant. And at the largest level, the album can be seen as a meditation on loss and redemption. But as Brian Eno says, the result is simply a rich and densely interconnected stretched envelope, called an album.
[edit] Track listing
- "Where the Streets Have No Name" – 5:37
- "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" – 4:37
- "With or Without You" – 4:56
- "Bullet the Blue Sky" – 4:32
- "Running to Stand Still" – 4:18
- "Red Hill Mining Town" – 4:52
- "In God's Country" – 2:57
- "Trip Through Your Wires" – 3:32
- "One Tree Hill" – 5:23
- "Exit" – 4:13
- "Mothers of the Disappeared" – 5:14
Music by U2, lyrics by Bono.
Produced and engineered by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.
"With or Without You", "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", and "Where the Streets Have No Name" were released as singles internationally and became smash hits. In addition, "In God's Country" was released as a fourth single, which performed modestly, in North America and "One Tree Hill" was released as a fourth single in New Zealand. "Red Hill Mining Town" had originally been slated as a single before it was realized during rehearsals for the Joshua Tree Tour that Bono could not hit the high notes in the song; it ended up being the only number not played on the tour from this album.
According to Bono in a BBC TV documentary, the track order for the album was devised by singer Kirsty MacColl. She put her favourite song first, then her second favourite, and so on.[3]
The original CD pressings of the album incorrectly indexed the ending of "One Tree Hill" at 4:43 and the beginning of "Exit" at 4:53. This is because a final, quieter stanza of "One Tree Hill" ("Oh, great ocean...") occurs once the song has died down and apparently ended. As a result, the stanza was for a long time thought to be the beginning of "Exit," even though it completely contrasts in tone with "Exit." This error has been corrected on later editions.
In 1996, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab remastered the album and released it as a special gold CD. This edition has slightly different running times, and features a slight change in the synthesised rhythm pattern just before the fade-out of "Mothers of the Disappeared" that is not audible on the Island CD editions.
A number of songs that were released as B-sides were thought to have been considered for a double-album version of The Joshua Tree, however the Joshua Tree was released in the 11-track version. "Spanish Eyes" and "Deep in the Heart" were released as B-sides to the "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" single. "Luminous Times (Hold on to Love)" and "Walk to the Water" were released as B-sides to the "With or Without You" single. "Sweetest Thing", "Silver and Gold" and "Race Against Time", were released as B-sides to the "Where the Streets Have No Name" single. Bono was the most vocal proponent of this version of the album, The Edge successfully argued for the version which was actually released.
[edit] Personnel
- Bono – vocals, harmonica
- The Edge – guitar, vocals, keyboards
- Adam Clayton – bass guitar
- Larry Mullen Jr. – drums, percussion
[edit] Additional personnel
- Brian Eno – keyboards, backing vocals
- Daniel Lanois – rhythm guitar, tambourine, backing vocals
- Flood - Mixing
[edit] Other Credits
[edit] Charts
Album
| Year | Chart | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1987 | The Billboard 200 | 1 |
| 1987 | Top Contemporary Christian | 36 |
Single
| Year | Single | Chart | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" | Billboard Adult Contemporary | 16 |
| 1987 | "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" | The Billboard Hot 100 | 1 |
| 1987 | "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" | Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks | 2 |
| 1987 | "Where the Streets Have No Name" | The Billboard Hot 100 | 13 |
| 1987 | "Where the Streets Have No Name" | Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks | 11 |
| 1987 | "With or Without You" | The Billboard Hot 100 | 1 |
| 1987 | "With or Without You" | Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks | 1 |
| 1987 | "Bullet the Blue Sky" | Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks | 14 |
| 1987 | "In God's Country" | Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks | 8 |
| 1987 | "In God's Country" | The Billboard Hot 100 | 53 |
| 1988 | "In God's Country" | Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks | 6 |
| 1988 | "In God's Country" | The Billboard Hot 100 | 44 |
[edit] Certifications
| Organization | Level | Date |
|---|---|---|
| BPI – UK | Gold | March 1, 1987 |
| BPI – UK | Platinum | March 12, 1987 |
| BPI – UK | 2x Platinum | April 13, 1987 |
| RIAA – U.S. | Gold | May 13, 1987 |
| RIAA – U.S. | Platinum | May 13, 1987 |
| RIAA – U.S. | 2x Platinum | May 13, 1987 |
| BPI – UK | 3x Platinum | July 7, 1987 |
| RIAA – U.S. | 3x Platinum | September 30, 1987 |
| BPI – UK | 4x Platinum | November 12, 1987 |
| RIAA – U.S. | 4x Platinum | December 22, 1987 |
| BPI – UK | 5x Platinum | July 12, 1988 |
| BPI – UK | 6x Platinum | March 1, 1992 |
| RIAA – U.S. | 6x Platinum | June 12, 1995 |
| RIAA – U.S. | 10x Platinum | September 11, 1995 |
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes and References
- ^ Conny Plank - eine Produzentenlegende, NDR Geman Radio, 11 February 2006
- ^ http://www.u2faqs.com/geography/#2
- ^ Kirsty: The Life and Music of Kirsty MacColl, BBC2, 3 March 2001
[edit] External links
- Discography entry at U2 Wanderer - Comprehensive details on various editions, cover scans, lyrics, and more.
- Album lyrics - Searchable album lyrics.
- "My two visits to U2's Joshua Tree" - Article about the tree on the album's cover.
- "Restore the Joshua Tree!" - An alternative track listing for the album that includes all of the B-sides, making it a double album.
- In God's Country: The Music That Inspired the Joshua Tree - A special compilation of artists named by the band as influences on the album's sound.
- "A study of the Edge's guitar delay" - A dissection of the techniques behind the Edge's signature delay effect, used extensively on this album.
- "One Tree Hill" - Information about One Tree Hill, the location in New Zealand after which the band wrote the song.
- U2 tours overview at U2-Vertigo-Tour.com - Includes setlists for every date on the Joshua Tree Tour.
- Quotes and information - Detailed background on each song.
- U2MoL - Contains fan interpretations and interview excerpts for each song.
