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In Unusual Step, U2 Reinterprets 40 of Its Best-Known Songs

Members of the Irish band U2, from left, Larry Mullen Jr., Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton appear at the screening of "U2 3D," at the 60th International film festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 20, 2007. (AP)
Members of the Irish band U2, from left, Larry Mullen Jr., Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton appear at the screening of "U2 3D," at the 60th International film festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 20, 2007. (AP)
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In Unusual Step, U2 Reinterprets 40 of Its Best-Known Songs

Members of the Irish band U2, from left, Larry Mullen Jr., Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton appear at the screening of "U2 3D," at the 60th International film festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 20, 2007. (AP)
Members of the Irish band U2, from left, Larry Mullen Jr., Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton appear at the screening of "U2 3D," at the 60th International film festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 20, 2007. (AP)

In reimagining 40 of their best-known songs, U2 recognized that many fans would experience them through earphones connected to a device in their pockets — rather than being belted out onstage.

That was one thought behind "Songs of Surrender," coming out this week. The four men of U2, now either 61 or 62 years old, revisit material written in some cases when they were little more than kids out of Dublin.

Particularly in those days, U2 songs were written primarily with concerts in mind. The Edge told The Associated Press in an interview that U2 wanted to catch the attention of people seeing the band for the first time, perhaps in a festival or as an opening act.

"There's a sort of gladiatorial aspect to live performances when you're in that situation," he said. "The material has got to be pretty bold and even strident at times. With this reimagining, we thought it would be fun to see intimacy as a new approach, that intimacy would be the new punk rock, as it were."

The Edge was the driving force behind "Songs of Surrender," using pandemic down time to record much of the music at home.

Given that his electric guitar and Bono's voice are the musical signature of U2, there's a certain irony in the absence of that guitar being the most immediately noticeable feature of the new versions. He sticks primarily to keyboards, acoustic guitar and dulcimer.

The process began without a roadmap or commitment to see it through if it wasn't working.

"As we got into it and got into a groove, we really started to enjoy what was happening," he said. "There was a lot of freedom in the process, it was joyful and fun to take these songs and sort of reimagine them and I think that comes across. It doesn't sound like there was a lot of hard work involved because it wasn't."

Much of the intimacy comes through Bono's voice. There's no need to shout, so he sometimes uses lower registers or slips into falsetto.

Lyrics are often rewritten, sometimes extensively in even a recent song like "The Miracle of Joey Ramone." Cellos replace the driving guitar of "Vertigo." Keyboards give "Where the Streets Have No Name" an ambient sound. "Two Hearts Beat as One," the original a high-octane rock dance song, now has a slinkier, sexy vibe and is one of four songs where The Edge takes lead vocal.

The band is fairly democratic in taking songs from throughout its catalog, although 1981's "October" album and 2009's "No Line on the Horizon" are not represented. "New Year's Day," "Angel of Harlem" and "Even Better Than the Real Thing" are among the songs left alone.

"We’re one of the only acts that has this body of work where a project like this would be possible, with the distance of time and experience where it would be interesting to revisit early songs," The Edge said.

Throughout music history, bands have occasionally re-recorded material for contractual reasons. Taylor Swift is the most famous example, putting out new versions of her older songs in order to control their use. Squeeze's "Spot the Difference" makes sport of how they tried to make new recordings indistinguishable from the originals.

Live recordings and archive-cleaning projects like Bob Dylan's "bootleg" series gives fans the chance to hear familiar songs differently.

Many older artists don't see the point of making new music, since there's little opportunity to be heard and fans are partial to the familiar stuff, anyway, said Anthony DeCurtis, Rolling Stone contributing editor.

"Revisiting your body of work in a creative way is a means of sustaining interest in your career," DeCurtis said. "Older fans might not be interested in another collection of your hits, but reworking them in a meaningful way could prove enticing. Younger fans don't have the same investment in your classics, so these new versions offer a route into your catalog."

The Edge encourages fans to give the new versions a try, suggesting they may even grow to prefer some of them.

"I don't think there's a competition between these and the original versions," he said. "It's more of an additive thing than a substitution. If you like the new arrangements, great. If you prefer the originals, keep listening.

"It's no problem either way," he said. "They're both valid."

The Edge said he's working on new music for U2, "and we've got some great stuff in the pipeline."

The quartet that met in drummer Larry Mullen Jr.'s kitchen when they answered an ad placed on a high school bulletin board is a remarkable story in longevity. A passage toward the end of Bono's book "Surrender," where he talked about looking around onstage at the end of their most recent tour in 2019 and wondering if it was the end, raised natural questions about how long U2 would continue.

"There are many reasons why U2 has stayed together for so long, but one of the main reasons is that it works so well for us as individuals," The Edge said. "I think we all shine the brightest as part of this collective. I certainly would not like to hang up the guitar."

This year will provide a test for a band that can count on one hand the number of times it has performed without all four members. U2 has committed to a run of shows in Las Vegas without Mullen, who is recuperating from surgery.

Would U2 continue if one of the original quartet decides it's time to hang it up?

"I wouldn't rule out the possibility that we could go forward with different members," The Edge said. "But also, equally, I could imagine us deciding not to. It would be a big challenge. But I think at the time we would know what felt right."

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Fans Criticize Beyoncé for Shirt Calling Native Americans 'the Enemies of Peace'

Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
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Fans Criticize Beyoncé for Shirt Calling Native Americans 'the Enemies of Peace'

Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
Beyonce, center, attends the men's Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2026 collection, that was presented in Paris, Tuesday, June 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

A T-shirt worn by Beyoncé during a Juneteenth performance on her “Cowboy Carter” tour has sparked a discussion over how Americans frame their history and caused a wave of criticism for the Houston-born superstar.

The T-shirt worn during a concert in Paris featured images of the Buffalo Soldiers, who belonged to Black US Army units active during the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the back was a lengthy description of the soldiers that included

“Their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries.”

Images of the shirt and videos of the performance are also featured on Beyoncé’s website, The Associated Press reported.

As she prepares to return to the US for performances in her hometown this weekend, fans and Indigenous influencers took to social media to criticize Beyoncé for framing Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries as anything but the victims of American imperialism and promoting anti-Indigenous language.

A publicist for Beyoncé did not respond to requests for comment.

Who were the Buffalo Soldiers? The Buffalo Soldiers served in six military units created after the Civil War in 1866. They were comprised formerly enslaved men, freemen, and Black Civil War soldiers and fought in hundreds of conflicts — including in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II — until they were disbanded in 1951.

As the quote on Beyoncé’s shirt notes, they also fought numerous battles against Indigenous peoples as part of the US Army's campaign of violence and land theft during the country's westward expansion.

Some historians say the moniker “Buffalo Soldiers” was bestowed by the tribes who admired the bravery and tenacity of the fighters, but that might be more legend than fact. “At the end of the day, we really don’t have that kind of information,” said Cale Carter, director of exhibitions at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.

Carter and other museum staff said that, only in the past few years, the museum made broader efforts to include more of the complexities of the battles the Buffalo Soldiers fought against Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries and the role they played in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. They, much like many other museums across the country, are hoping to add more nuance to the framing of American history and be more respectful of the ways they have caused harm to Indigenous communities.

“We romanticize the Western frontier,” he said. “The early stories that talked about the Buffalo Soldiers were impacted by a lot of those factors. So you really didn’t see a changing in that narrative until recently.”

There has often been a lack of diverse voices discussing the way Buffalo Soldiers history is framed, said Michelle Tovar, the museum's director of education. The current political climate has put enormous pressure on schools, including those in Texas, to avoid honest discussions about American history, she said.

“Right now, in this area, we are getting push back from a lot of school districts in which we can’t go and teach this history," Tovar said. "We are a museum where we can at least be a hub, where we can invite the community regardless of what districts say, invite them to learn it and do what we can do the outreach to continue to teach honest history.”

Historians scrutinize reclamation motive Beyoncé's recent album “Act II: Cowboy Carter” has played on a kind of American iconography, which many see as her way of subverting the country music genre's adjacency to whiteness and reclaiming the cowboy aesthetic for Black Americans. Last year, she became the first Black woman ever to top Billboard's country music chart, and “Cowboy Carter” won her the top prize at the 2025 Grammy Awards, album of the year.

“The Buffalo Soldiers play this major role in the Black ownership of the American West,” said Tad Stoermer, a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “In my view, (Beyoncé is) well aware of the role that these images play. This is the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour for crying out loud. The entire tour, the entire album, the entire piece is situated in this layered narrative.”

But Stoermer also points out that the Buffalo Soldier have been framed in the American story in a way that also plays into the myths of American nationalism.

As Beyoncé’s use of Buffalo Soldiers imagery implies, Black Americans also use their story to claim agency over their role in the creation of the country, said Alaina E. Roberts, a historian, author and professor at Pittsburgh University who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to present day.

“That’s the category in which she thought maybe she was coming into this conversation, but the Buffalo Soldiers are even a step above that because they were literally involved in not just the settlement of the West but of genocide in a sense,” she said.

Online backlash builds ahead of Houston shows Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social media this week to criticize Beyoncé or call the language on her shirt anti-Indigenous. “Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt,” indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000, asked in a post Thursday.
Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt.

“The Buffalo Soldiers are an interesting historical moment to look at. But we have to be honest about what they did, especially in their operations against Indigenous Americans and Mexicans,” said Chisom Okorafor, who posts on TikTok under the handle @confirmedsomaya.

Okorafor said there is no “progressive” way to reclaim America's history of empire building in the West, and that Beyoncé’s use of Western symbolism sends a problematic message.

“Which is that Black people too can engage in American nationalism," she said. "Black people too can profit from the atrocities of American empire. It is a message that tells you to abandon immigrants, Indigenous people, and people who live outside of the United States. It is a message that tells you not only is it a virtue to have been born in this country but the longer your line extends in this country the more virtuous you are.”