Bono’s great song that more U2 fans should know

Bono wrote some classic songs as part of U2, like “With or Without You” and “One.” But one of his best solo songs can be found in a Sean Penn documentary called Citizen Penn: “Eden (To Find Love),” which Bono co-wrote with Linda Perry.

It’s a slow song, like many of U2’s biggest hits, and Bono delivers a unique vocal performance. He also sings various aphorisms such as “The Fly.”

He begins almost at a whisper as he quietly sings the opening verse. Throughout most of the song, Bono uses his lower register, similar to “Book of Your Heart” and U2’s cover of “Get It On (Bang a Gong).”

“Is it part of the attraction that you want to be destroyed? / I am the ghost on the water, you are the formless void / When I first heard your voice I was upset / You woke me up,” he whispers in the first verse.

Bono has aged like a fine wine

Make no mistake: Bono can still sing as well at 64 as he did in his 20s. However, his ability to show restraint is present on “Eden (To Find Love).”

On U2’s recent albums, he has occasionally showcased his deeper singing voice. The aforementioned albums “Book of Your Heart” and “Get It On (Bang a Gong)” are just two examples.

Songs of Surrender is an album of 40 newly recorded songs from the band’s back catalogue. Say what you will about the album, track by track, but several songs play to Bono’s current strengths as a singer.

“All I Want Is You”, “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” are some of the singer’s vocal highlights.

A connection to U2

The lyrics are a clever link to one of U2’s songs. At the beginning of the song, Bono says, “It was Adam, not Eve, who drove God out of the garden,” a playful twist on the Adam and Eve story from the Bible.

A few years later, U2 recorded a new version of “Beautiful Day” on Songs of Surrender. This stripped-down, acoustic arrangement featured fresh lyrics in the middle section.

Bono sings a line that serves as a counterpart to the line in “Eden (To Find Love)”.

“I saw Adam beg Eve for forgiveness / It was no woman that God drove out of the garden,” he sang.

Maybe Bono didn’t do it on purpose, but whatever the case, it’s a funny connection that I noticed when I first heard it last year.

The crescendo

All of this builds to a wonderful crescendo. While Bono holds back in the first few verses, he starts singing towards the end. He sings along with backing vocals – it’s unclear whether Bono or perhaps Perry sings the backing vocals – in a sort of “Even Better Than the Real Thing.”

He sings a few final aphorisms: “Your eyes will find the silence / Inside the hurricane / You know you have to do something other than complain.”

At the end of the song, Bono sings the line “To find love” in full falsetto. He hasn’t sung full lines so well in falsetto since “Lemon” and would do so again on Songs of Surrender.

Look, “Eden (To Find Love)” isn’t a classic U2 song — actually, it’s more of a Bono song than anything else. But it’s encoded with the DNA of a U2 classic and contains playfully ironic lines. It would be great to hear the band live sometime, but that’s a pipe dream.