U2 broke through with the ambivalent ambiance of this tortured tale of repressed desire. ‘With or Without You’ was one of the first songs composed for ’The Joshua Tree’; but took months to get right. Adam Clayton remembers: “The chord sequence came from Bono but, in early versions, it sounded very traditional bedause the chords just went round and round and round. It was hard to find a different take on it or a new way into it; it was just a promise of a song. We started playing with a drum machine and having it build up with a big fat bass.”
The distinctive guitar sound came from Michael Brooks Infinite Guitar, which replaced the pickup on a guitar with a magnetic device that vibrates the strings. Edge recalls: “I was sent a prototype for the Infinite Guitar by Michael Brook. It arrived during the sessions with elaborate instructions on how to hook it up: one wrongly placed wire and you could get a nasty belt of electricity. This piece of gear would have failed even the most basic of safety regulations. When it did come on the road with us, my poor guitar technician would regularly electrocute himself. It was homemade technology, but very effective. It gave me infinite sustain, like a violin. I had just taken it out of the box and was playing around with it in one room while Gavin Friday and Bono were in the control room listening to the backing track of rescued ‘With or Without You’. We were really at an impasse in the search for the right arrangement, and were just at the point of leaving the song to one side. Then, through an open door, they heard the sound of the Infinite guitar combining with the bass and drums and just went: ‘That’s it! But what the fuck is it?”
Bono explains: “Gavin’s involvement in ‘The Joshua Tree’ can’t be underestimated. He personally rescued ‘With or Without You’. He pulled it out of the wastepaper bin, organized it, structured it, and was the one who believed it could be a hit when Brian and Danny had passed on it. It’s my chord sequence, but what makes it special is Brian Eno’s sequencer; he did for ‘With or Without You’ what he’d done for ‘Bad’, sketched it out and improvised. Edge was working on his Infinite Guitar, which makes a beautiful haunting ghost of a guitar sound, and it was going on in one room while the bass chords were going on in another, and I heard them in stereo working together. We brought Edge in and started recording immediately. The lyric is pure torment. One of the things that was happening at that time was the collision in my own mind between being faithful to your art or being faithful to your lover. What if the two are at odds? Your gift versus domestic responsibility? I had always been the kind of person who would sleep on everyone else’s floor, the eye of a traveling rat, a natural tinker. I would just wander off and be very happy. So now I have this person in my life whom I love more than my life but I’m wondering if the reason I’m not writing is because I’m now a domesticated beast. I’m wondering if I’m house-trained? If I meet somebody and I want to go off with them, to find out what their world is like, I can’t because I’m a married man. It’s not even about sexual infidelity, I just remember thinking: ‘Is this the life of an artist? Am I going to have kids and settle down and betray my gift or am I going to betray my marriage?’ it was a very difficult time in my head. I had met a couple of people on the way who had taken advantage of my naivete, is the best way I can put it, and I realized I know so very little about this world and now, the future looked like I was going to know even less. You can learn about politic, culture, but your emotional life also has to be developed. I think in some senses mind wasn’t, and I was going through all this kind of uncertainty. I was at least two people: the person who is so responsible, protective an loyal and the vagrant and idler in me who just wants to run from responsibility. I though these tension were going to destroy me but actually, in truth, it is me. That tension, it turns out, is what makes me as an artist. Right in the center of a contradiction, that’s the place to be. There I was. Loyal, but in my imagination filled with wanderlust, a heart to know God, a head to know the world, rock star who likes to run amok and sinner who knows he needs to repent. All of those things were going on but I didn’t understand at the time that is actually it…So that song is about torment, sexual but also psychological, about how repressing desires makes them stronger. The most important line is probably, ‘And you give yourself away’. it just flipped it and it releases all the mental tension, which is when the ‘Aah-aah’ comes out. That is what giving yourself away is, musically.”
The Edge says: "Notes actually do mean something. They have power. I think of notes as being expensive. You don't just throw them around. I find the ones that do the best job and that's what I use. I suppose I'm a minimalist instinctively. I don't like to be inefficient if I can get away with it. Like on the end of 'With or Without You'. My instinct was to go with something very simple... I still think it's sort of brave, because the end of "With or Without You" could have been so much bigger, so much more of a climax, but there's this power to it which I think is even more potent because it's held back."
‘With or Without You’ was a worldwide smash, going to number thirty-seven in Demark, fifteen in Austria, thirteen in Sweden, ten in France and Switzerland, seven in Germany, five in New Zealand, four in the UK, two in the Netherlands, and number one in Canada, Ireland, and the US. Adam apparently said he couldn’t believe that the band’s first US chart topper was a song about God. Larry Mullins recalls: “From my perspective, everything was going along really nicely; we were making progress by degrees, sometimes small increments, but always moving in the right direction. Suddenly ‘The Joshua Tree’ was number one in America, for nine weeks. Then ‘With or Without You’ went to number one, We were on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine. We were no longer trying to conquer America. One moment you are on one side of the fence, the moment you are catapulted to the other. This was something most bands only dream about; we were the band.”
See the stone set in your eyes
See the thorn twist in your side
I wait for you
Sleight of hand and twist of fate
On a bed of nails she makes me wait
And I wait without you
With or without you
With or without you
Through the storm we reach the shore
You give it all but I want more
And I'm waiting for you
With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you
And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away
My hands are tied
My body bruised, she's got me with
Nothing to win and
Nothing left to lose
And you give yourself away
And you give yourself away
And you give
And you give
And you give yourself away
With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you
With or without you
With or without you
I can't live
With or without you
With or without you
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