For the "Love" of U2 Trivia Quiz

Answer: "a tightrope hanging on my ceiling"

"Do you feel in me anything redeeming / Any worthwhile feeling? / Is love like a tightrope hanging from my ceiling?" The singer laments the monotony of life ("It's always the same"), and the lines on love suggest he has been burned. It's a pretty song to end their debut album (released in 1980), but is nowhere near as catchy as their hit "I Will Follow," which opens "Boy."

Answer: "He who made the blind to see"

The last verse ends thus: "Open up, open up, to the lamb of God / To the love of He who made the blind to see / He's coming back / He's coming back / O believe Him." The last three lines tie into the song's refrain ("Won't you come back tomorrow?"). "October" is a fairly spiritual album, opening with the single "Gloria".

In an interview with John Waters about that song, Bono noted that after "October," "people saw that you could actually write about a woman in the spiritual sense and that you could write about God in the sexual sense. And that was a moment, because before that there had been a line."

Answer: "the time of year"

"I don't get the answers right / I'll leave that to you. / Is this love out of fashion / Or is it the time of year? / Are these words distraction / To the words you wanna hear?" This song, written during Bono's honeymoon with his wife Alison, is a gentle addition to an album that mainly concerns strife and human suffering. I'm particularly fond of one couplet in the first verse: "They say I'm a fool, they say I'm nothing / But if I'm a fool for you oh, that's something."

Answer: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Pride (In the Name of Love)" was written for the American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose picture was displayed behind the band as they sang it in concert. It's the final verse that refers directly to him: "Early morning, April four / Shot rings out in the Memphis sky. / Free at last, they took your life / They could not take your pride." Dr. King was actually murdered in the evening, not in the morning, but this anthem is a beautiful and stirring tribute.

The album closes with another tribute to Dr. King, "MLK," a gentle, lullaby-like dirge ("Sleep, sleep tonight / And may your dreams be realized") that U2 also played at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2002 in honor of the September 11 dead.

Answer: rust

This hit single from "The Joshua Tree" (March 1987 - single released that August) is very evocative, though it's difficult to pin down its meaning. The line about building and burning down love is from the chorus; the last verse includes the lyrics "The city's aflood, our love turns to rust. / We're beaten and blown by the wind, trampled in dust. / I'll show you a place high on a desert plain / Where the streets have no name." In a 1987 interview with Propaganda 5, Bono said that "I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a spiritual location, maybe a romantic location. I was trying to sketch a feeling . . . a feeling of wanting to break out of [a] city and a feeling of wanting to go somewhere where the values of the city and the values of our society don't hold you down."

Answer: "the hands of love"

The song begins very quietly - so softly that one must often turn up the volume to hear the first verse, which ends with "He wanted to believe / In the hands of love." By the last verse, it has crescendoed to a normal volume:
"Hand in the pocket
Finger on the steel
The pistol weighed heavy
His heart he could feel
Was beating, beating
Beating, beating oh my love
Oh my love, oh my love
Oh my love"
Not the most cheerful of songs, but a very powerful one.

Answer: Psalm 23

The verse, two thirds of the way through a song describing how a desperate person now relies on love to bring his life meaning, is "Yea, though I walk / In the valley of the shadow / Yet I will fear no evil. / I have cursed thy rod and staff / They no longer comfort me. / Love, rescue me." The song is the eleventh track on the 1988 album "Rattle and Hum."

Answer: B. B. King

Said the Edge to Q Magazine in 1998: "Bono and I met B.B. King in Dublin and he said, Hey, you guys should write me a song. We said, Ah, yeah. I thought it was unlikely but a while later Bono said, 'Remember B.B. King? Well I've done this song' . . . We decided to use it on 'Rattle and Hum' and asked B.B. if he'd join us." "When Love Comes To Town" is a catchy tune describing the change in a man's life as he experiences love for the first time: "Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down / But I did what I did before love came to town." This song also continues U2's tradition of religious imagery, with a verse referring to Jesus's death and resurrection: "I was there when they crucified my Lord . . .

But I've seen love conquer the great divide."

Answer: "to work out right"

"You say you want your love to work out right / To last with me through the night." This beautiful song was, according to the official website (u2.com), inspired by a coda that the Edge added to "With or Without You." I am always moved by the chorus, sung softly and sweetly: "All the promises we make, from the cradle to the grave / When all I want is you" - and I freely confess that it has special meaning to me, since it was my first slow dance with the man I later married. :-)

Answer: "Give me one more chance, let me be your lover tonight."

"Give me one more chance, and you'll be satisfied. / Give me two more chances, you won't be denied. / Well, my heart is where it's always been / My head is somewhere in between / Give me one more chance, let me be your lover tonight." The singer assures his prospective lover that "You're the real thing, Yeah the real thing . . . Even better than the real thing." It's a fast-paced, intoxicating take on love, though it focuses on physical, not emotional, attachment.

It was released as a single in June 1992.

Answer: "one need in the night"

And the song goes on . . . "You say love is a temple, love a higher law . . . You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl. / And I can't be holding on to what you got, when all you got is hurt." The conclusion: "One life, but we're not the same. / We get to carry each other, carry each other. / One, one." It's a beautiful song, but completely inappropriate for the wedding receptions where it's often played.

Answer: "Love is blindness."

"Love is blindness, I don't want to see / Won't you wrap the night around me? / Oh my heart, love is blindness. / Love is clockworks and cold steel / Fingers too numb to feel. / Squeeze the handle, blow out the candle / Love is blindness." Slow, melancholy, and haunting, "Love Is Blindness" is a beautiful close to the album.

Answer: for the first time

The song, a gentle, slow-moving ballad, is "The First Time." Romantic love is only one of its subjects; it also refers to paternal love, the love of God, and brotherly love. "I have a brother, when I'm a brother in need / I spend my whole time running / He spends his running after me ... For the first time, I feel love." The guitar work is understated and beautiful.

Answer: Do You Feel Loved?

"You got my head filled with songs / You got my shoelaces undone. / Take my shirt, go on, take it off me / You can tear it up if you can tie me down. / Do you feel loved?"

Answer: "Does love light up your Christmas tree?"

The song, released as a single in December 1997, laments the sorry state of the world: "Nobody here taking orders / When love took a train heading south ... It's the blind leading the blond / It's the cops collecting for the cons. / So where is the hope and where is the faith and the love? / What's that you say to me? / Does love light up your Christmas tree? ... And if God would send his angels / And if God would send a sign ..." It's dark, it's bitter, it's agnostic, and it's the only song on this great 1997 album that harkens back to U2's 1980s style.

Answer: what you're thinking of

As he sings a few lines later, no matter what else was going on in the world, "you could only feel your own pain." Though the lyrics are very personal, the video and presentation suggest that it is meant as a general plea to human beings to wake up and stop their suffering. "Please, please, please get up off your knees ... Your holy war, your northern star / Your sermon on the mount from the boot of your car." "Please," one of my favorite songs, was released as a single in September 1997, and is the penultimate track on the album "Pop." The Edge called it "the most intricate piece of music we've ever done."

Answer: Bono's wife, Ali

According to The Edge (in "Q Magazine"): "Bono wrote it as a birthday present for Ali. When we recorded 'The Joshua Tree' we liked it, but it was her song so it was different from the rest. Afterwards we realised it should have been on the album." A hit release only a decade late, the song describes the pain that goes with love: "I know I got black eyes / But they burn so brightly for her / I guess it's a blind kind of love. / (Oh, the sweetest thing.)"

Answer: "Everlasting Love"

"Everlasting Love" was a 1968 hit for the band Love Affair. U2's version was first released as one of the B-sides to the 1989 single "All I Want Is You". It's a plea to reclaim an abandoned love. "Hearts gone astray / Keeping up when they go / I went away / Just when you needed me so / You won't regret it / I'll come back begging you. / Don't you forget, welcome love we once knew ...

Whenever love went wrong / Ours would still be strong / We'd have our own / Everlasting love ..."

Answer: monkeys

"In the days when we were swinging from the trees / I was a monkey stealing honey from a swarm of bees ... Did I know you? / Did I know you even then? / Before the clocks kept time / Before the world was made." It's a joyful song with some wonderful imagery: "Are you still growing wild / With everything tame around you?"

Answer: "The only baggage you can bring is all that you can't leave behind."

"Walk On" was dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggles against the military junta ruling Burma (Myanmar). As Bono described her in an interview with Sonicnet.com: "She left the comfort of her home in Oxford, as an academic, and her family and her son and her husband, and went to do the right thing for her people. And it was just one of the great acts of courage in the 20th century . . .

At first, I was writing it from the point of view of her family . . . and then in the end I kept it a little abstract and just let it be a love song about somebody having to leave a relationship for the right reasons." The song itself is (in my opinion, anyway) a masterpiece of poetry and beauty: "You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been / A place that has to be believed to be seen . . . And I know it aches, and your heart it breaks, and you can only take so much / Walk on, walk on." This quiz was a pleasure to write, and I hope you've enjoyed it too.