Thank god Songs Of Innocence wasn't a viable streaming model

Only a band as big as U2 could’ve conceived of the notion that one of its albums, ominously its thirteenth studio effort, needed to be heard by the entire globe the second it was completed—and only a band as big as U2 would’ve had the means to actually achieve this goal. That’s how Songs Of Innocence wound up in every iTunes user’s library on September 9, 2014, right after Apple’s annual product launch wrapped up with a surprise appearance from U2, who teased the new album with a performance of “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone).”

What happened next is the stuff of legend, the kind of legend that reshapes a band’s legacy. Songs Of Innocence was foisted upon millions and millions of people, a high percentage of whom either didn’t care for U2 or weren’t familiar with the band at all. The wave of confusion and outright anger came as a shock to the band. As lead singer Bono recounted in his 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, “Quite quickly we realized we’d bumped into a serious discussion about the concern people have about the access of Big Tech to our lives.”

Much of the discussion on Songs Of Innocence over the last ten years has focused squarely on this technological overstep, partially because it marked a turning point in how we consume music digitally. Spotify had a foothold in the American marketplace, but Tidal had yet to be launched, and Apple Music was still many months away from its streaming debut. In 2014, accessing music on phones and computers was still very much dependent on purchases and downloads. With Songs Of Innocence, U2 skipped both of those steps—the album automatically appeared in the “purchases” section of every iTunes user’s library, and those who had downloads turned on automatically found 11 new files taking up space on their devices without their input. Musicians were angry because the financials were, and still are, murky: If everyone just got this album for free, then how would it generate revenue? What would this mean for artists and how they would be paid for their music? Consumers were angry because of the egregious privacy overstep: Tech companies shouldn’t be able to just add files to devices without users’ explicit consent.

The rise of streaming platforms and subscription services over the past decade has rendered both of those concerns mostly obsolete. While there’s still a debate over how much musicians are paid when people stream their music, there are at least payment agreements in place. And choosing to stream an album is significantly different than having something you’re not interested in downloaded to your device without your knowledge. But U2’s strange stunt had larger repercussions for the band, even beyond the questions it raised about digital privacy.

The striking thing about Songs Of Innocence is that everything about its release seems rushed. Surprise albums were not unknown—it had been less than a year since Beyoncé suddenly dropped her blockbuster eponymous album—but superstars like U2 were often wedded to a traditional roll-out, meticulously releasing early singles and doing long-lead press before the heavily hyped unveiling of the new work. Physical editions of the record trailed its digital appearance—common now, not so much back then—and the press focused on the iTunes stunt, not the music itself, a confluence of events that created the perception that the record was hurried to the market when the opposite was true: U2 had been toiling on the material since shortly after the release of No Line On The Horizon on 2009. The collaboration with Apple was essentially an idea Bono cooked up to get U2 to finally finish an album that always seemed to need another collaborator, another overdub, another new track to snag a new audience. 

Listening to Songs Of Innocence now, long after the furor over its release has quieted even if it’s never been forgotten, what’s striking about the album is that it seems as if it was destined to be a wake-up call for U2. A band who found its sense of purpose in amphitheaters and arenas, U2 had long stopped trading in nuance; its gift always lay in making the personal seem universal. To an extent, that’s what the band attempted once again with Songs Of Innocence, an album that finally gained some thematic shape when Bono decided to delve into his past, etching out an autobiography in the form of song. 

It’s possible to discern this personal narrative on Songs Of Innocence—”The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” itself is a testament to how punk changed the life of a young Paul Hewson—but it takes the kind of close listening the sonics of the album don’t necessarily invite. Intending the album as a bracing modern riposte to the retro-leanings of No Line On The Horizon, U2 waded into murky digital waters, collaborating with any producer with a notable resume. Danger Mouse, the Gnarls Barkley mastermind who previously collaborated with the Shins, the Black Keys, and Gorillaz, served as the chief producer, then U2 brought in Paul Epworth—a producer of 2000s neo-post-punkers Bloc Party, the Futureheads, and Maximo Park who gained fame through his association with Adele—for additional work. When those sessions started to drift, they inexplicably hired Ryan Tedder, the OneRepublic leader who wrote Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love,” to help them find their way.

Tedder’s presence suggests just how at sea U2 was during the Songs Of Innocence sessions: his glib sentimentality and glassy melodies run counter to the band’s naked empathy. That emotion can be perceived on Songs Of Innocence, it’s just mummified under a computerized veneer. Compare the cluttered original version of “Every Breaking Wave” to the spartan rendition on Songs Of Surrender, last year’s collection of re-recorded hits by U2: Not only does the melody have space to breathe, it’s easier to hear the bittersweet intent of the song, how it’s a plea for acceptance. There’s no sense of acceptance on the original version of the song, a sentiment that extends throughout Songs of Innocence: the band is continually chasing every breaking wave on this record, running away from the doubts and uncertainty flowing through Bono’s words just as surely as they’re abandoning the group’s inherent chemistry. 

The debacle of the release of Songs Of Innocence didn’t quite force U2 to get out of its own way for Songs Of Experience, the 2017 sequel that compounded the problems of its predecessor by adding even more producers to the mix. Instead of going smaller, which they eventually did with Songs Of Surrender, U2 went even larger on Experience, a move that helped illustrate the fatal flaw of Innocence. Somewhere underneath that processed clamor and yearning desire for relevance lies a modest, moving account of an artist attempting to come to terms with their fate by questioning their beginnings. The contours of that album are interesting but they’re lost through U2’s quest to remain the biggest band in the world, a desire that culminated in the group forcing its music on every Apple user on the planet—a move that ironically finally brought the band back down to earth. Streaming still hasn’t fully reconciled the opposing forces of digital privacy and music accessibility, but it’s a lot better than the grim future predicted by Songs Of Innocence‘s rollout.