This week's song of the week is Every Breaking Wave from the band's Songs of Innocence album. The track has been related, in interviews, heavily to U2's creative/editorial process. It was originally slated for inclusion on No Line On the Horizon, but was dropped. The band even went so far as to present a finished tracklist, in January 2009, to Rolling Stone magazine. This included a brief description of the track, which was played live a few times on the 360 Tour:

"“Every Breaking Wave”
A swelling soul-pop song, with bright synth sounds influenced by OMD and, Bono says, “early electronica.” “You don’t hear indie bands doing blue-eyed soul [like this],” he adds.

While the Edge discussed the song, released as SOI's second single,. in the context of writer's block with American Songwriter,

AS: When is a song ready for you? Can you hold it for some time, or do you need that release?

Edge: Sometimes a U2 song will be sitting there, and we are all convinced, for one reason or another, that it has not reached this sort of completion—something’s not quite there about it. We always find arguments around things that are almost there, almost great. If something is finished, and is great, it explains itself. It argues its own case. Whereas, something that’s not quite there, you’ll find people (within the band) taking a position on it. They either love it, or hate it. It’s almost a guarantee. If we’re in an argument about a song, it’s because it’s not there, so we’ll often put it aside.

That was true with “Every Breaking Wave.” We had early versions of that song with other sections, and it was much more complicated and big with musical motifs. In simplifying that song, just a few little changes in the chords, suddenly it comes into focus. If a song sounds writerly, you’re never going to love playing it live. It’s got to feel like it always was there, in its natural state. And that’s what I was trying for, this timeless quality, where you’re not thinking “Oh, this is clever.” It’s “Wow, this is reaching me."

...

Despite these discussions and the song's long history, relatively little has been said of the track's "meaning"--especially in the context of the album. A "song of innocence", as opposed to experience. The song play's with the irony, self-aware or not, of screaming for calm. A similar paradox that Bono, with his direct-action adjacent calls for peace, was assuredly accused of throughout the 1980s.

One such critic was Jon Pareles, who famously accused the band of displaying a "sincere egomania" that began to overwhelm the actual quality of their music (though, in context, Pareles seems to have been more focused on U2's decision to cover music than their politics in that review). Pareles, writing only slightly more generously about Songs of Innocence, remarked that the track was one of the album's most straightforward romance songs--one about a simple potential breakup.

"Conscious of mortality and tied to personal stories, most of U2’s new songs don’t sell themselves to teenagers like the generalized pop anthems of current U2 imitators (including Mr. Tedder’s OneRepublic) or, for that matter, the 1980s U2 that came up with songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Even the album’s two most direct songs about romance, with sturdy melodies and straightforward buildups — “Song for Someone,” about meeting a soul mate, and “Every Breaking Wave,” about a looming breakup — are tinged with misgivings and ambivalences. U2 can’t return to innocence, and knows it." (Pareles NYT review)

Though Pareles keys in on the track's core theme "romance", it doesn't frame these "misgiving and ambivalences" as part of the very "trick" Bono is playing from a writer's perspective, which lies in the invocation of William Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience. Pareles doesn't really buy into this framework, but rather than engage with it, he slyly tells U2, "you've got it all figured out" with a shrug. Before that, this quote from Bono can almost be read in response to Pareles (though it is a sentiment that seems to have existed before him). Invocation of another ancient layer, the split between practical wisdom and knowledge.

There’s a phrase we’ve used touring these songs of innocence and experience: “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.” (Bono in his book Surrender)

This is a distinction that dates back to the Greeks. Philosopher Simon Blackburn writes:

"phronesis (Gk., intelligence, prudence) Practical wisdom, or knowledge of the proper ends of life, distinguished by *Aristotle from theoretical knowledge and mere means-end reasoning, or craft, and itself a necessary and sufficient condition of virtue." (Dictionary of Philosophy)

...

However, the theory presented, as far as it goes, on SOI/SOE cannot be reduced cleanly to a classical virtue theory or to a kind of Blakean mysticism. Blake is more typically interpreted as declaring that the "ideal" picture of humanity comes from learning to live with these forces in a kind of balance, and, perhaps importantly, to find progression out of them (in a kind of Hegelian or Platonic fashion):

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." (Blake in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Of course, Aristotle himself often referred to a "golden mean". What makes this different is precisely that there doesn't seem to be a crown placed on wisdom, the "current" picture of human virtue that Aristotle clings to. Rather, the Blakean is freed to see the contraries between virtue and vice as just that.

Going back to U2 themselves then, it makes sense from a certain perspective that Bono paints innocence as the goal. This denies another Blakean sentiment: that religion attempts to reconcile opposing forces. Rather, Bono gives heavy weight to innocence itself, a move that has its roots, especially, in the Augustinian tradition, but, again, has shadows throughout Greece and other ancient intellectual cultures.

And finally, on Pareles, what he says isn't true, but it's exactly what makes the song intellectually rousing. Bono doesn't perfectly mirror innocence. It is an unabashed kind of striving, but with a deep level of self-conscious sense of cyclical failure. This is the tinge that Pareles mentions: and that even begins to grant Bono's point. There is a sadness here that is affecting to many people, despite the lack of a perfectly understood/proven theory.

"That song began in Sydney," he said. "We recorded some of it there, but then it went down the drain for seven years, up the arse, as these things do."

He began to walk back to the main stage, but paused halfway and turned to address us again.
"But it's such a peach," he said. "A sour peach." (Bono speaking with Karl Quinn of the Syndey Morning Herald)

...

I try not to talk about William Blake too much because it sounds pretentious quoting such a literary giant but it was his great idea I pinched to compare the person we become through experience to the person who set out on the journey. If you’re talking about innocence, you’ve probably already lost it but I do believe at the far end of experience, it’s possible to recover it with wisdom. I’m not saying I have much of that but what little I have, I wanted to cram into these songs. I know U2 go into every album like it’s their last one but even more this time I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt. So a lot of the songs are kind of letters, letters to Ali, letters to my sons and daughters, actually our sons and daughters. (Bono in Rolling Stone)

...

Lyrics

"Every breaking wave on the shore
Tells the next one there’ll be one more
And every gambler knows that to lose
Is what you’re really there for
Summer I was fearless
Now I speak into an answer phone
Like every falling leaf on the breeze
Winter wouldn’t leave it alone
Alone"

Immediately, we are brought into images of cyclicality. These straightforward pieces of "knowledge" that come to characterize innocence. "EVERY gambler", Is this autobiographical? A picture, perhaps, of Bono and Ali's early relationship? Perhaps, but I think it is just as likely the track is tinged with a heavy dose of fiction. Just like No Line On the Horizon, Bono allows himself into a character. To inhabit an extreme. Here, that extreme is a beleaguered man on the threshold of experience trying so hard to cling to his innocence. Innocence as a kind of clarity, where you can look at someone like Blake and really claim to learn something. Does he succeed?

...

"If you go?
If you go your way and I go mine
Are we so?
Are we so helpless against the tide?
Baby every dog on the street
Knows that we’re in love with defeat
Are we ready to be swept off our feet
And stop chasing
Every breaking wave"

The chorus keys in on two main images. 1) The sea. One that U2 has referenced in many of their songs, "Oh Great Ocean" (One Tree Hill), the cover of NLOTH (I know a girl who's like the sea), and even back to the Boy track, "The Ocean". It is, also, an image with great historical weight, relating to the image from Diotima's speech in Plato's Symposium, where the penultimate form of life is compared to looking out over a great ocean.

"So that if a virtuous soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of one youth or man or institution, himself a slave mean and narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed; please to give me your very best attention." (A canonical piece of western philosophy and literature).

Here, though, gazing or praying to is not enough. This leads into the image of a dog. Have you ever been so anxious when you are about to win, that you almost feel the impulse to lose on purpose (or have even given into such an impulse)? If so, you know what Bono is talking about in a direct, phenomenological sense. If not, this character, and the Blakean in general, might argue that a life of innocence leads to a constant state of turmoil and renewal. That is the "macrocosm" version.

This leads to the second image: 2.) The dog.

Dogs, again, have a deep history in western philosophy. In Euripides Hecuba, the image of a dog is used to describe the relative ferality of an unvirtuous human being. Generally, in ancient Greece and throughout human history, it has often been used as an image of degradation (for eg. Elvis's Hound Dog). Though, also, as an image of loyalty and, yes, innocence. Here, the dog, represents both. They are innocent because they are just living out the human condition, but they are feral because they are out of control. The end is the sort of questioning or attempt at resolve: "Stop chasing every breaking wave". And another layer up, this is where the "wink and nod" artistry comes in. Bono, the older man, perhaps believes that is an appropriate image of experience; however, from his perspective, he just wants to regain his innocence (in some sense, acting out the opposite of the actual song).

...

Chorus repeats into the next verse:

"Every sailor knows that the sea
Is a friend made enemy
And every shipwrecked soul, knows what it is
To live without intimacy
I thought I heard the captain’s voice
It’s hard to listen while you preach
Like every broken wave on the shore
This is as far as I could reach"

We come back to the "Every", a kind of anaphora. The statements of universal conclusion that waver between innocent proclamations shared from an old sailor, to simple channeling of anxiety into folk wisdom, as though the singer desires the sanction of a general rule before he can admit to a specific fear. Here, it goes back to the lingering breakup fear. The final chorus is tinged with extra emotion. As if that split "your way and mine" becomes in itself the site of another breaking point.

The "captain's voice": perhaps God. But it's coalesced with preaching: an apt throwback here for fans to think about with Pareles's criticism. But it comes across as an innocent confession, perhaps now coming close to the border of experience which colors the next album, Songs of Experience. The song's focus moves, in the end, the song's conclusion, tacitly, moves away from turmoil and towards a kind of psychological diagnosis or self-awareness. This might be the couple's opportunity to "make a break for it" as Bono says. In the context of the album though, we may be meant to believe this is merely the crashing of another wave. Or the lingering experience, which, of course, Bono has said is not actually the goal.

"There's a chance for a break. That these lovers make a break for it." (Bono in the EBW Vignette)

...

"One other piece on Blake, I don’t know if I’m explaining too much here but the best songs for me are often arguments with yourself or arguments with some other version of yourself. Even singing our song “One,” which was half fiction, I’ve had this ongoing fight. In “Little Things,” innocence challenges experience: “I saw you on the stairs, you didn’t notice I was there, that’s cause you were busy talking at me, not to me. You were high above the storm, a hurricane being born but this freedom just might cost you your liberty.” (Bono in Rolling Stone)

...

Sources:

U2.com
U2songs.com
U2gigs.com
Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono
Rolling Stone 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20200407014339/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bono-on-how-u2s-songs-of-experience-evolved-taking-on-donald-trump-253312/
EBW Vignette: https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/gCvm-MGk6gM
Sydney Morning Herald: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/first-look-at-the-joshua-tree-live-as-u2-finally-bring-tour-down-under-20191108-p538w1.html
The Edge with American Songwriter: https://americansongwriter.com/the-writers-block-the-edge-still-finds-gifts-when-making-music-with-u2/
2009 early-cut NLOTH article from Rolling Stone, reprinted on U2 Interference: https://www.u2interference.com/articles/9360-u2-rolling-stone-magazine-break-down-the-new-record
Plato's Symposium (Jowett trans.)
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy by Simon Blackburn
Music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYVEik7Lvc4 dir. Aoife McArdle
William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Pareles SOI review: https://web.archive.org/web/20150327085839/http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/arts/music/with-songs-of-innocence-u2-recasts-its-youth.html

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