“With or Without You” by U2

"With or Without You" was the lead single from The Joshua Tree, U2's fifth album, released on Island in 1987, and it's a ballad that smolders for ages before it catches. It grew out of a demo made in late 1985 that the band kept working at all through the album sessions. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois produced, Flood recorded it, and Steve Lillywhite mixed it with Mark Wallis; the producers play on it too, Eno on keyboards and Lanois on omnichord, tambourine and extra guitar.

The Edge's guitar is the secret weapon: long, glowing sustained notes drawn from a prototype of the Infinite Guitar, hanging in the air instead of riffing, while Adam Clayton's bass line throbs underneath like a heartbeat in the dark. On the surface it's about love in trouble, but Bono drew it from the pull between his life as a musician and his life at home, and he sings it as if neither side will let him go. Larry Mullen, Jr. keeps the drums patient right to the end.

It was the band's most successful single up to then and their first number one in both the US and Canada, holding the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks. It's the second most covered U2 song, and Rolling Stone later ranked it 131st among the 500 greatest songs of all time.

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