The Reel Thing: U2’s 12 Greatest Soundtrack Songs
U2 have always made what you might call "cinematic" music. Think of the dramatic soundscapes that build and build before opening up into grand, valley-filling, 360-degree-spinning hooks ("Bad," "Where the Streets Have No Name"), or the moody, montage-ready synth-and-bass textures they created with Eno and Lanois ("Promenade," "Mothers of the Disappeared"), which suggest great Michael Mann movies never made. It's unsurprising, then, that Hollywood started calling, especially after the boys from Dublin became movie stars in their own right via Rattle & Hum.
Yet outside of a few tentative forays in the 1980s, it wasn't until German auteur Wim Wenders approached the band in 1991, looking for music for his sci-fi epic Until the End of the World, that the band began to make original soundtrack work an integral aspect of its art. From that point forward, U2 have maintained a sideline industry as situational songwriters, crafting tunes outside of their own song-cycles and occasionally doing so for singers not named Bono. This has allowed them to experiment with modes and genres as disparate as jazz, lounge, Celtic balladry and candied pop.
Gathered together, the following 12 songs run the sonic gamut and span over 20 years yet nevertheless comprise a surprisingly satisfying, oddly cohesive and uniquely unselfconscious body of work — a shadow U2 album that's only visible in the rearview.
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“Until the End of the World”
Until the End of the World, 1991
U2 were noodling around with some elements for what would become the song — now one of their signature live songs thanks to the Edge's helicopter riff — but it wasn't until director Wim Wenders asked the band to contribute to his globe-trotting sci-fi epic that it really started coming together. In retrospect, Wenders gave U2 far more than what they gave him. Their contribution is but one of a host of great songs on a soundtrack featuring Nick Cave, the Talking Heads and Leonard Cohen. Far more significantly, the movie and its title offered an apocalyptic premise that conjured Bono's own preoccupations with God and original sin, and in the character of Judas ("I kissed your lips and broke your heart") he found the voice for the spiritual drift that undergirds Achtung Baby.
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“Stay (Faraway, So Close!)”
Faraway, So Close!, 1993
Wenders returned to U2 for a contribution to his Wings of Desire sequel and came away with one of the band's best pop songs. On a roll after Achtung Baby and working on new material in a friskier, less belabored mode, the band produced this expansive, bleeding heart love song featuring open-throated vocals atypical for an era in which Bono veered toward falsetto or flat affect. It sticks out as an outlier among the rough, radioactive stones of Zooropa, but it's pretty much the best thing to come out of the ill-fated Faraway, So Close!
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“Conversation on a Barstool”
Short Cuts, 1993
Bono and the Edge peeled away from their rhythm section to pen this meandering, whiskey-soaked jazz song for Robert Altman's Short Cuts. The songwriters trade in guitar-based composition for a piano-based arrangement, and they eschew familiar rhyming schemes for a blunt, conversational approach. And through the bittersweet, infinitely evocative voice of legendary singer Annie Ross, the song is unrecognizable as anything emanating from the world of U2 — except for its melancholy, longing and bruised resiliency, which was tonally in keeping with the band's early-Nineties bent.
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“In the Name of the Father”
In the Name of the Father, 1993
Next, Bono took a break from the Edge, collaborating with English artist Gavin Friday on several contributions to Jim Sheridan's searing, Oscar-nominated film about an unjustly incarcerated Northern Irish rebel. The title song, which opens the film, starts well within the U2 wheelhouse, as a slow-build march in the "Sunday Bloody Sunday" mold, then explodes into something simultaneously industrial and tribal, Western and Eastern, cannily evoking centuries (and continents) of political conflict, cut through with a single hammered guitar chord and Bono's haunting promise to "follow you down." Also excellent is the Sinéad O'Connor-sung "You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart," a magnetically melodic ballad that erupts into a dance-ready Celtic anthem tailor-made for O'Connor's talents.
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“Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me”
Batman Forever, 1995
Who could have predicted that the wannabe-camp, Titanic-meets-the-iceberg bloat of the Joel Schumacher-era Batman franchise would inspire one of U2's best radio anthems. The song plays up both the camp (Bono in glam-trash Mephisto mode; the Russ Meyer-derived title) and the bombast (a soaring, Hollywood-romantic refrain are a guitar riff amplified by a string orchestra) while hanging it all on some of the Edge's catchiest ever hooks. It's an object of absurd, meaningless fun — the sort of object that would have been unthinkable during the self-serious Rattle & Hum era. Except for U2, even a toss-off isn't really a toss-off. "You don't know what you're doing," Bono goads, "Babe, it must be art."
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“GoldenEye”
GoldenEye, 1995
If U2 courted but ultimately transcended camp with "Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me," Bono and the Edge settled for simply hitting the mark with "GoldenEye." A perfectly serviceable James Bond theme that coasts on serving as a nostalgic vessel to classic Sixties Bond themes, the song comes complete with staccato string plucking, canned horn blasts and a bossa nova shuffle. That said, the songwriters again prove adept at writing for other singers, playing to Tina Turner's nasty gal lower register before opening things up for an appropriately hair-raising big finish.
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“Your Blue Room”
Beyond the Clouds, 1995
The band's serious excursions into soundtrack work reached an apex when they recorded an entire album of songs for films — imaginary films, at that. Something of an extension of producer Brian Eno's ongoing Music for Films project, Original Soundtracks 1 veered so far off the standard U2 path that they balked at making it an official release, slapping the name Passengers on the cover and ensuring that only a fraction of their usual audience would find it. As it turns out, the record is not only consistent with U2's sonically playful early-Nineties output, it also showcases the band at its most musically committed, fully serving individual songs rather than notions of self-presentation. Two songs on the record actually were intended for a film, Michael Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds (co-directed by frequent U2 contractor Wim Wenders). "Beach Sequence" never amounts to much more than a groove and a mood, but it's entrancing enough to temporarily park the film in visions of John Malkovich staring out to sea, and the shuffling, church-organ-fueled "Your Blue Room" serves as the film's wistful, spooky finale (with a spoken-word coda courtesy of Adam Clayton).
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“Mission Impossible Theme”
Mission Impossible, 1996
With Bono and the Edge off doing James Bond themes, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. asserted their own film-score chops with this industrialized adaptation of the 1960s TV show theme song. The duo mine the groove for all its worth, but instead of an edgy Nineties remix of a Cold War ditty, the track plays more like an outdated holdover from Jan Hammer's Eighties (complete with a synth-boppy, Saturday morning cartoon-worthy sub-theme at the 1:24 mark). For U2 — and for the culture at large, which saw the song reach Number Seven on the Hot 100 — these were strange days of near-peak saturation.
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“I’m Not Your Baby”
The End of Violence, 1997
The fourth collaboration in six years between the band and director Wim Wenders yielded this unhurried, stop-start duet (the first) between Bono and countrywoman Sinéad O'Connor. A half-deconstructed, half-hearted anthem, the song comes on like a slack studio outtake from the Pop album — in a good way. Amid a percolating fizz of samples and loops (courtesy of Flood and Howie B) and the Edge's intermittent noodlings and rumblings, the singers trade whispers, shouts and raps but remains studiously out of synch, effectively destabilizing the disquieting refrain: "Everything is all right, everything is all right. I'm not your baby…. please."
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“The Hands That Built America”
The Gangs of New York, 2002
Thanks to this high-profile Martin Scorsese epic and the full-court press PR tactics of Harvey Weinstein, U2 finally received an Oscar nomination after a decade of excellent soundtrack work. Too bad it was for their worst film song. An endless, over-produced, self-important dirge, "The Hand That Built America" lacks the very drama it wants to flaunt and features a shrug of a melody that seems reluctant to distract from a chorus whose schmaltzy symbolism would have benefited from distraction. What's worse is that the song invades the finale of an otherwise great film, torpedoing a catharsis nearly three hours in the making.
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“The Ground Beneath Her Feet”
The Million Dollar Hotel, 2000
The mind-meld between U2 and Wim Wenders peaked (and seemingly combusted) with The Million Dollar Hotel, a magical realist nut-house romance conceived by Bono himself. The film was a bit of a shambles, but the band did turn out some serviceable tracks, including the shuffle-turned-revivalist romp "Stateless" and this unrequited love song, featuring lyrics lifted directly from Salman Rushdie's novel of the same title. Underneath Bono's delicate, belly dance-inducing quiver is a mélange of tones and textures, including a haunted organ, Daniel Lanois' space-country guitar-picking, the Edge's big-sky bombast, Larry Mullen Jr.'s steady brushwork and assorted blips and effects.
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“Ordinary Love”
Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, 2013
After receiving a 2009 Golden Globe nomination for "Winter," a nicely restrained, lean-into-the-wind, confessional anthem from the film Brothers, U2 nabbed their second Oscar nomination for this rousing, pluralistic plea on behalf of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. There's little surprising about the composition or instrumentation — the Edge draws from a familiar bag of tricks, and a piano insists on poignancy — except in the way that Bono's frayed falsetto invites the column of backup voices on the chorus and earns the "we" in "we can't deal with ordinary love." And unlike the ball-peen hammer bluntness of "The Hands That Built America," it's a subtle and ultimately more effective theme song. It's no "Until the End of the World," but it also doesn't need to be. As a commissioned work, the song first needs to serve the movie. What's remarkable is how so many of these songs still managed both to serve and to expand the artistry and imagination of U2.