“Mysterious Ways” by U2

"Mysterious Ways" is the eighth track on Achtung Baby, U2's seventh album, from 1991, and it went out as the record's second single. It started as a jam called "Sick Puppy", and the only piece anyone liked was Adam Clayton's bass part. Building a song on it was a fight: at one session Bono and producer Daniel Lanois argued fiercely, and the breakthrough came only when The Edge started playing with a Korg A3 effects unit.

What came out of it is U2 learning to move their hips. There's a danceable beat, a funky guitar hook from The Edge, who adds keyboards too, and percussion thick with congas, with Larry Mullen, Jr. on drums and percussion and Lanois adding more. Bono sings mystical lines about romance and women and plays guitar himself. Brian Eno and Lanois produced it, Flood engineered, and The Edge, Flood and Lanois mixed it.

Critics singled it out as one of the album's standouts and a sign of how far the band had traveled. It hit number one in Ireland, went top ten in Canada and elsewhere, topped both the Modern Rock and Album Rock Tracks charts and reached 9 on the Hot 100. The video was shot in Morocco with belly dancer Morleigh Steinberg, who later married The Edge, and when the band first played it live, on the Zoo TV Tour in 1992, a belly dancer joined them onstage.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.