"Bullet" is one of the few Joshua Tree non-singles to remain a live U2 staple- its bluster hints at the band's current broad aesthetic- but it's slightly out of place among a record mostly characterized by its grace, subtlety, introspection, and beauty. Smartly, U2 balanced those personal songs with more universal tracks, often with an emphasis on forgotten people and forgotten places around the globe: "Red Hill Mining Town" (about the mid-80s UK miners strike), "Exit" (inspired by Norman Mailer's Gary Gilmore tome The Executioner's Song), "Mothers of the Disappeared" (about Argentina's murdered political dissidents), and "Bullet the Blue Sky" (about U.S. U2 have always flirted with charismatic Christianity, and the Joshua Tree songwriting process finds the band in a particularly reflective mood "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and" "With or Without You" are steeped in religious imagery, but even their constant radio rotation hasn't robbed these introspective songs of their potency or effectiveness. It's an album made for dusty, empty flyover country. Reunited with producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, it's as if the band finally took a moment to ponder the wide-open American spaces it had been traveling through for years and applied those musical and cultural observations to its songs. The album was nowhere near as strident as War or as radically overwrought as The Unforgettable Fire (which was, lest one forget, recorded in a frickin' castle). alone.įunnily enough, while The Joshua Tree once and for all catapulted U2 to permanent superstardom, the album marks something of a conscious refinement of the group's sound. The more the band's fan base grew, the harder U2 worked to get even bigger, and in 1987 they enjoyed their breakthrough into superstadom thanks to The Joshua Tree, which went on to sell 10 million copies in the U.S. The group fed off that enthusiasm, criss-crossing the country as much as its schedule allowed. And indeed, the States ate up U2's bombast, landing both War (1983) and The Unforgettable Fire (1984) in the U.S. U2 started out as a scrappy band riding the punk wave out of Ireland, but from the beginning they clearly had their sights on America.