"Hello from London."
...with those words from Bono and four cracks of Larry Mullen Jr.'s drumsticks on the downbeat, U2 began to give all it could to bring Americans who watched them back from the edge of an inconsolable despair, barely two weeks beyond September 11th. If you watched them that night, when they took a plain white soundstage for their portion of the America: A Tribute to Heroes benefit concert, you may have realized for the first time why U2 has mattered for so long. If you're about my age -- 34 -- some part of your life was bettered by the band providing its soundtrack. On that night, their music touched millions who simply needed to feel anything other than the familiar rough surface of their communal grief, fretted raw.
Heaven on Earth, We need it now I'm sick of all of this hanging around
It wasn't their best live performance -- not at all. Presumably, the sound engineering was hastily assembled for an impromptu international broadcast. It read the band flat, with even a slight line buzz through the Edge's chiming guitar intro. Bono's voice itself was weary. He carried it through the opening verse like a folded flag.
I'm sick of the sorrow, sick of the pain sick of hearing, again and again that there's never gonna be -- peace on Earth
When the Edge broke the hymnal wide open, leaning into the soaring opening chorus, I mainly remember completely losing my composure for the first time since it all happened. I couldn't take my eyes off the television as a band I had grown up with reached out to say "We don't know how to get through this, either. So we'll play."
And if your glass heart should crack for a second you turn back, oh no be strong, walk on what you got they can't steal it, no they can't even feel it walk on, walk on stay safe tonight
A song about overcoming your lament of something loved and left behind, now seemed to tell you that something was a way of looking at the world. U2 has always been known as a band of tireless faith, and I hope theirs in the rest of us wasn't misplaced. With today's release of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, I'm virtually certain my next four years are going to be colored in some way by this music that other works simply won't match. I only hope that the moments this time around are much more benign, everyday, but every bit as personal.