If you were to pass on one piece of advice for your children or loved ones, what would it be?
According to U2's Bono, that's how the band's new single "Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way" began.
The anthemic song on the 2017 album Songs of Experience packs a powerful message.
“If you get a bit stuck, it's good to have a line in your back pocket from a song or a poem or something somebody told you,” Bono told iHeartRadio. “It sounds mookish, but I was wondering, if for any reason I wasn't around, what was the line of my own that I would leave my kids? And I couldn't think of one.
“So I wrote 'Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way,' because I believe that. And I thought it might be useful to them if they came up against any obstacles in their life.”
Bono explained: “Everybody substitutes their own obstacles for [what] gets in the way. You know, what gets in the way of your realizing your full potential? What gets in the way of a community realizing its full potential? What gets in the way of the whole world realizing it's full potential, or whatever it is. Love is bigger than it. And I really believe that.”
Although there has been a lot of tragedy over the last few years, with it has come a lot of strength, bravery, and love. Bono opened up about some of the more grand gestures of love that he's witnessed, including the creation of March For Our Lives in the aftermath of the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
“March For Our Lives was a magnificent transformation of grief into love,” he said. “Just, what's the worst thing [that] could ever happen to you? You know, high school massacre. And then just turning into this great act of love, and I'm not sure that such a gigantic movement has ever been started by a bunch of teenagers before, but these are the grand gestures of love.”
U2 is currently on the North American leg of their eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE Tour, which stops in Montreal on June 5 and 6.
“I'm really excited about the idea of completing the story that we started at with Songs of Innocence and finished with Songs of Experience,” Bono said. “It's only on this tour where those two stories come together, and I think they do in very powerful, emotive way.”
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He said the tour is extremely personal for the band.
“U2 tours tend to be a bit operatic, but they don't often have such specific stories in the way operas do. But with this tour, we have a really big emotional night out that's tied to a very personal story,” explained Bono. “The story is mine, but it could be Edge's or Adam's or Larry's, and hopefully, it's one that connects with other people who've been through similar stuff.
“I suppose it's about growing up and how hard that is, even when you're a supposed grownup. There may be some melodrama in my story. I lost my mother and grandfather the same moment. And I had a near-miss with a car bomb in Dublin in the ‘70s. But even if it's not so melodramatic, everybody, at some stage in their life, has to deal with grief and everybody deals, on a daily basis, with danger. There's danger out there.”
Original article by Nicole Mastrogiannis at iHeartRadio