The Edge says U2 had no idea what their next album, Carnaval De Luz, would sound like when they collaborated with Dolly Parton.
U2 went through a period of nine years without releasing any original material, breaking that streak with the recently released Carnaval De Luz. The band are back with an incredible new album and, when asked about their collaboration with the late country legend Parton, The Edge said it was during a time when there was no idea of what a new album would sound like. The Bono-fronted band were asked by BBC Radio 2 host Vernon Kay about how the song came together, with the “freeing” feeling of not having to piece the Parton collaboration into an album at the time benefiting the band.
The Edge said: “Well we were at a phase of working on some projects leading up to the U2 album and we weren’t sure what they were going to be so it was a beautiful moment of creativity where you just you don’t have an agenda you just are making music for the sake of it.
“It is it’s a great feeling yeah and we had some sessions with Brian Eno we tried to persuade him to do something quite Irish centric. We got in like about an hour in and we realised, ‘Okay, what we’re going to do here, is we are just going to surrender to Brian and go with the flow of what he was doing?’
“So we, in a couple of days, generated like 20 little sketches of pieces of music, a few of which have ended up on the YouTube project. Bono and I were doing another similar idea around the possible collaboration towards a side project with Ed Sheeran and Johnny McDaid to again work on some folk influenced songs. And at that point, Bono had this idea.
Bono weighed in too, paying tribute to Parton and calling her the “queen of our carnival.” He added: “We were looking for something to unify our album because it would be nice if when the characters in our album could deal with what’s going on in the outside world. It’s a really fractious time that we live in where everyone’s got a point of view and, you know, you’re the enemy if you don’t agree with them.
“She’s the penicillin for that, isn’t she? She’s the antidote to all that. But we didn’t know it would work. And Dolly has started a song called Torn. And she said, ‘Look, you can take it whatever way you want, you know, and I might like where you take it.’ And we took it quite a ways away from where she started. So when we sent it back, it was very different. It was a kind of sci-fi country soundscape.
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