U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree was a triumph, elevating U2 from an arena act to a stadium band. The resulting tour was made into a documentary film called Rattle and Hum. U2's intention was to praise American blues and gospel music. Instead, the band was seen as attempting to lecture audiences on the history of roots music. Critics labeled the film a pretentious vanity project and excoriated U2 for arrogance and hubris.
The band (Bono, Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton) were stung by reviews. They returned to Dublin and took a break from music. In 1990, they were ready to record a new album. Bono and Edge wanted to go in a new direction focusing on electronic dance music.
Bono was influenced by experimental German bands like Kraftwerk and Einstürzende Neubauten who tapped into club culture and industrial sounds. While The Joshua Tree derived inspiration from the American Southwest, U2 recorded their next album in Berlin. The Berlin Wall had fallen and the band hoped to be inspired by the reunification of Germany.
U2 chose to record at Hansa Studios in Potsdamer Platz. Just 150 yards from the fallen western wall, Hansa Studios was where David Bowie recorded Low and Iggy Pop Lust for Life. U2’s new album would be called Achtung Baby. In a 2011 documentary about the making of the album, U2 recalled driving to the studio past broken concrete, shattered glass and burned out hulks of abandoned Trabant vehicles. The weather was drab, just like the band. “Even before we went to Germany there was a sense of something not quite right,” Bono said. “When we got there we were on completely different pages.”
Edge was going through a divorce from his high school sweetheart Aislinn. U2 had been together since 1976 and Edge’s pain permeated the entire band. “It was the first crack on the beautiful porcelain jug that was our music and our community,” Bono said. Edge later said, “Leaving London for Berlin was a distraction, a way to escape. We were disappearing into the music as a refuge. This approach didn’t work. I wasn’t in a good, positive head space. I was running away I suppose.”
U2 hired producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno who’d worked with them on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. Eno wanted U2 to break away from “the domesticity of Dublin” where they dealt with plumbers and interior decorators. Eno famously said, “Interior decorators are the death of recording.”
Recording began in October 1990. Adam Clayton (bass) felt Bono was out of his depth with electronic dance music. Larry Mullen Jr. (drums) was upset about the prospect of using drum machines. The band’s confidence, born from the success of The Joshua Tree, was faltering. Bono later said, “There’s an environment out of which music grows. There’s a faith that’s necessary to move from one note to another. That was not the environment we were in.”
The song ideas Bono and Edge brought from Ireland weren’t working. Clayton said, “We were going down a lot of blind alleys, there was a lot of friction, nobody was particularly happy.” Clayton later confessed he felt it might be time for the band to break up. Eno remained philosophical. “It’s always difficult. If it isn’t difficult I don’t trust it.”
Bono went into problem-solving mode. “There was no us against them during the recording, it was each man for himself. This is a betrayal of the concept of a band. We believe in music as a sacrament. You take your shoes off in its company. We’ve quite a low opinion of the musician and a high opinion of music. We’re only reverent to the song if it happens.”
The first song to take shape was “Mysterious Ways” (originally called “Sick Puppy”). Edge experimented with different bridges. Lanois asked Edge to play two of these bridges sequentially. A chord sequence emerged (A Minor, D, F, G). “The verse offered some kind of eternal joyful melody,” Clayton said.
“Something powerful was happening in the room,” Bono added. “Everyone knew it. It was one of those hairs on the back of your neck moments.”
The Edge said, “At the instant we were recording, I got a very strong sense of its power. We were all playing together in the big recording room, a huge, eerie ballroom full of ghosts of the war, and everything fell into place. It was a reassuring moment, when everyone finally went, ‘oh great, this album has started.’”
Bono began calling out chords and improvising vocal sounds. The band followed his lead. “It was a pivotal moment,” Bono said. “We’d been going through this hard time where nothing was going right. Suddenly we were presented with this gift. It steadied everyone’s nerves in the studio.”
“It wasn’t that we found a sonic identity,” Clayton added. “We found a spiritual identity. That’s what we needed.”
The resulting song was “One.” It’s a meditation on relationships, personal and group. The song asks poignant questions such as “Did I disappoint you,” or “Is it getting better?” It’s a song about vulnerability and culpability. Who’s to blame when a relationship falls apart? How do you survive when the foundation of your life crumbles?
“The band comes alive when they recognize something new in the room,” Bono said. “It can happen quickly or slowly. In the case of ‘One,’ it happened quickly.”
Bono was invited to a gathering organized by the Dalai Lama called the Oneness Festival. He wrote a letter to the Dalai Lama signing off with the words, “We’re one, but we’re not the same.” This became the theme of “One.” In Bono’s memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story he writes, “I don’t buy into the homogeneity of the human experience. I don’t think we’re all one. We can be one, but I don’t think we have to see things the same way for that to be so.”
While writing the lyrics, Bono conjured a gay son coming out to his religious fundamentalist father.
Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without.
You say love is a temple, love a higher law
You ask me to enter but then you make me crawl
I can’t be holdin’ on to what you got
When all you got is hurt.
The son yearns for his father’s acceptance. But he refuses to accept his father’s pain and torment. He refuses to live a life without love.
Well it’s too late tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We’re one but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One!
“The song is a bitter, twisted, vitriolic conversation between two people who’ve been through some nasty, heavy stuff,” Edge said. “The line we get to carry each other suggests there is a privilege to help one another, not an obligation.”
In his memoir Bono writes, “It’s a song about coming together, but it’s not the old hippie idea of ‘Let’s all live together.’ It is, in fact, the opposite. It’s saying, We are one, but we’re not the same. It’s not saying we even want to get along, but that we have to get along together in this world if it is to survive. It’s a reminder that we have no choice.”
The lyrics of “One” acknowledged that everyone was feeling resentment toward each other. Bringing this darkness into the light took the pressure off and allowed the music to flow. “The way through writer’s block is always by being truthful,” Bono said. “To write a song about division, a bittersweet song about disunity…As a band we had a blood pact. We have to be truthful with each other.”
U2 returned to Ireland for Christmas. They reconvened in the new year at Elsinore House, a supposedly haunted mansion on the Dublin coast. They had several songs that worked beautifully: “Mysterious Ways,” “Ultraviolet,” “So Cruel.” Eno said, “There’s just one song I really despise, and that’s ‘One’. It bores me to tears.” He urged the band to remove the melancholy aspects of the song and the acoustic guitar. Lanois felt the song was “too beautiful” and needed an aggressive guitar part. He grabbed a Gretsch guitar and composed a combative hammer-on sound that “juiced” up the song.
The final album mix took place at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin. On the last night of recording, Edge wrote a new guitar part to accompany the vocal line “Love is a temple” near the end of the song.
“One” was released as a single on February 24, 1992. Royalties went to AIDS research. It reached #7 on the UK charts and #10 on the US Billboard chart. Axl Rose told RIP Magazine, “‘One’ is one of the greatest songs ever written. Now I can see and understand why people were into U2 years ago.”
For years, U2 fans told Bono they played “One” at their wedding. His response was always the same, “Are you mad? It’s a song about splitting up.” Ironically, “One” is the song that kept U2 from splitting up.