"Your Song Saved My Life" - U2
Happy Anniversary
Bono is singing about how music saved his life, namely a song. Interestingly both Chris Martin and Bono are singing in tandem about how the love song saved their lives. What Chris Martin doesn't know is that Bono deliberately date referenced this release, in that he released it on the 29th anniversary of when I first saw him in concert, the concert that changed everything. It's on record in the iBook, p. 394, beginning of Chapter 9, and is what Chapter 9 is about. That was the day I first saw U2 live, and it was important enough to write about it and every development Bono had musically after that moment, up until meeting him in person, and afterwards. As they say, that's all. That's the tweet.
What follows is how I'd interpret the song if the song was personally intended, if the date of the release was deliberate. It is not that I'm asserting it links in significantly to what I've written, it does not. It's just that given the significance of the date drop (on top of the other date drops), I feel "safe" offering an interpretation. There's no way to know in the sense of that none of this has ever been confirmed by Bono, of course, but let's just summarize what he's done that ties into the book (after he got the half draft of the book in 2011), which decreases the probability that all of this is coincidental every time he does it:
Songs of Innocence
1) U2's song title for track 10 on this album quotes the sincerely line of my opening letter ("This is Where You Can Reach Me Now")
2) brings back lyrical reference to the cherry tree ("Cedarwood Road"), which is only in the song "Salome" prior (1992), a song that in the book takes almost a chapter to explain
3) writes and dedicates a song to Andy Rowen ("Raised by Wolves"), which Bono did once before ("Bad", 1984), after the book discloses it was Andy who led the writer to U2's secret studio in 1999. In the book the author's father's name means "shield wolf".
4) The track "Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way" describes someone being caught by the moon crying on Killiney Bay at night, which happened the night after a full moon entry where I was singing on the roof of a Dublin pub. In the book draft Bono received (thanks to the journal entry format) this happened a little over a page before I actually met him for the first time. These elements are all in the song, along with "rage" (and the suggestion to sing instead of talk), which could have been put down to five negative articles on Bono's philanthropy dependency along these lines. Also the entire transpiration (which began with the U2 concert encounter on November 3rd 1992) began for the author at age 21.
5) In a podcast preview right before the album's release Bono related how his laptop was stolen (even though this was an event that happened eighteen years ago), which happened very shortly after the personal encounter in 1999 in the same year, an event which figures prominently in the book
6) U2 dropped a letter snippeting the lead single's lyrics ("The Blackout", -the quote was, "blackout, it's clear, who you are will appear") on U.S. fans loosely in the path of an eclipse (delivered to coincide with the eclipse), and then released Songs of Experience on December 1st, two days before a supermoon, which was what had happened in December 1999 when I encountered him the second time (a supermoon occurred two days after). These are both time datings that occur in the book. The first time I met Bono, an eclipse hit near totality over Dublin twelve days before. Bono's lyric that triggered everything was "you know the sun is sometimes eclipsed by a moon, you know I don't see you, when she walks in the room".
7) In the live BBC performance to presage the album's release, Bono snippets "Walk to the Water" in "All I Want is You". This happened to name the street I walked down when I first met him, and the internal response I had to what he said first in conversation, being that it wasn't cold.
8) The bonus track, "Book of Your Heart" has Bono reading a book and describing his reaction to it, being that he now realizes the author had framed the nature and origins from the very beginning, and the book is the map of the writer's heart, every mark made on it, which would remain unchanged whether the author changed names or not. The name change had been filed with the book copyright and was then changed on all social media accounts, and was the pen name for the investigative articles. That he's reading a book (with himself in it) is reinforced by "the long descriptive passages where we don't know what to say" and "we are not fictitious characters, we don't belong to this world".
9) in the liner notes Bono brings up childhood neighbors, (the Rowen family), credits the family and family patriarch for being formative to his Biblical foundation, (this was conveying who gave Bono a Biblical upbringing, when the author's was her father), and says the cherry tree was in their yard
10) stealth names the author by her real name by using combined biblical referencing in the first couplet
11) references the book a second time in terms of something that's in it (p. 79) "It was Adam not Eve who threw God out of the garden, you wrote me" -not what I said exactly, I said I'd been taught that Adam had actually sinned first
"Your Song Saved My Life"
12) released on the date (November 3rd) the author first saw U2 in concert, which is a full chapter because it started everything. This is the third date conjunction with the book
When you start to add things up it begins to change the odds. That said, if it is intentional, the intention is to attend to something while devaluing it in the same token, because it is deliberately designed to not constitute evidence to anyone else, and therefore the sum of intention (meaning Bono's manner of recognizing the author) is designed to confine that impact to the author's perception.
If that sum of linkages is intentional, this is how I would analyse "Your Song Saved My Life", which is so far buried under layers of intention and meaning now, the words can't really be absorbed in terms of their meaning at face value. Here they have that value, in fact here that value has been unique to this existing circumstance for twenty-one years.
If you want the lyrical analysis (and more hyperlink substantiation), hop the link.
I'm just going to note that Spiritualized released "Always Together With You" the day before, November 2nd. No, they weren't on the list. We'll see what it is in February.