Mysterious Ways

Stumbled across "Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview" while skimming Peter Traver's Flag of Our Fathers review. It's about three hours long. I'm only about an hour into it, and there's this half-hour section (starting at about 45:00 of the first section) where they talk about his religious influences in his early life.

Fascinating stuff. I can totally identify with his early adulthood years. He had a foot in both worlds so to speak. He loved the rock and roll scene, but he several band members were, at the same time, going to hard core Bible studies. He felt as though both sides were saying to him, "You can't do both; you have to choose." But he rejected that notion and tried to fuse them both in his music.

For him it was an intuitive move; he said, at the time he wouldn't have been able to articulate what he was doing. But now he sees that his attraction to genres like the blues is in large part due to their similarity to David's psalms. He said he sees the psalms that David wrote while hiding out in caves to be David's "blues"...anger at God expressed musically.

On a side note, you can totally tell that the Rolling Stone interviewer wanted to portray his Bible study group as a fanatical religious group that the band needed to be freed from...he even suggested the term cult. But Bono totally turned the guy's suggestion on its head and defended the group intellectual integrity.

Bono's pretty cool.

go (red)

edit 10.18.06
Found the link to the Rolling Stones article based on the interview. Check out pages 2-4