U2 now not releasing its new album because of Donald Trump

Well, when we came off the last tour, the Innocence and Experience indoor tour, we headed straight into finishing the second album of that set, Songs of Experience, which we were pretty much complete with after a couple of weeks of the final touches leading up to the end of the year. And then the election [happened] and suddenly the world changed. We just went, "Hold on a second – we've got to give ourselves a moment to think about this record and about how it relates to what's going on in the world." That's because it was written mostly, I mean, 80 percent of it was started before 2016, but most of it was written in the early part of 2016, and now, as I think you'd agree, the world is a different place. You're talking about Trump and Brexit? The Trump election. It's like a pendulum has suddenly just taken a huge swing in the other direction. So, anyway, we then were looking at the anniversary of The Joshua Tree, and another thing started to dawn on us, which is that weirdly enough, things have kind of come full circle, if you want. That record was written in the mid-Eighties, during the Reagan-Thatcher era of British and U.S. politics. It was a period when there was a lot of unrest. Thatcher was in the throes of trying to put down the miners' strike; there was all kinds of shenanigans going on in Central America. It feels like we're right back there in a way. I don't think any of our work has ever come full circle to that extent. It just felt like, "Wow, these songs have a new meaning and a new resonance today that they didn't have three years ago, four years ago." And so it was kind of serendipitous, really, just the realization that we needed to put the album on ice for a minute just to really think about it one more time before putting it out, just to make sure that it really was what we wanted to say.

I guess what this means is that the election of a Republican president necessitates that U2 record a protest album, and that the one they'd written was something apart from that entirely. You can say it's about the special horrors of Trump, but the comparison to Reagan and the '80s seems to suggest it's more or less pure partisanship at work here.

U2 should do what it wants, I suppose, but I'd hate to think my creative output was dictated by election results, especially in a country where I don't even live. That said, if your approach to writing music is determined by political developments, why write and record an album during a year when you know there's a chance the landscape could change dramatically and you might be stuck saying to yourselves, "We didn't think ahead and do any protest songs?" Oh well. Does anyone care about U2 anymore anyway? I mean it as a serious question, since it seems to me it's been an awfully long time since they've been relevant. But I'm sure there are gigantic U2 fans who will tell me I'm an ignorant moron who has no business commenting on such things. Some of you know that my long-time favorite band is Genesis (although I'm really into Foster the People at the moment, and they love Bernie). Anyway, if you're going to do a protest song, you do understand you need to do it with puppets, right? Fun fact: The Mike Rutherford puppet was later used as Jesus.

Dan's new novel, BACKSTOP, is a story of spiritual warfare and baseball. Download it from Amazon here