BLAKE & BONO

This is from my post to a Quaker blog in 2024.

If we are open to listening and to seeking new experience we are often led in unexpected and surprising directions. When seeking performances by The King's Singers I came across a meditative video which included in the title Bono/U2 arr. Bob Chilcott - MLK.

This is the legend for the recording: "To mark Martin Luther King Day 2018, The King's Singers took a few minutes to record their cover of this song, MLK, by Bono from the band U2. The arrangement is by Bob Chilcott, former tenor in The King's Singers, and it was recorded during in L'Oratoire du Louvre, Paris."

So my next step was to check out Bono and the connection to Martin Luther King.

These are the simple words of the song:

 

"Sleep
Sleep tonight
And may your dreams
Be realized

If the thundercloud
Passes rain
So let it rain
Rain down on him
Mmm
So let it be
Mmm
So let it be

Sleep
Sleep tonight
And may your dreams
Be realized
If the thundercloud
Passes rain
So let it rain
Let it rain
Rain on him"

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Adam Clayton / Dave Evans / Larry Mullen / Paul Hewson [Bono]

 

I found this tribute to King from Bono:

“Dr. King kept us tolerant in a time of terror,” Bono says during his 10-minute tribute. “Kept us faithful to peace and community. Made us believe in joy and justice. Showed us the way to a shared humanity. Dr. King’s voice is louder today than it has ever been. He is one of the true fathers of our American dream.”

Now I wanted to know more about Bono and U2. Searching on Wikipedia through his biography and career as a pop singer, I learned that a tour which the group made in 2014-15 was named Songs of Innocence. The next tour 2017 they named Songs of Experience. A combined Innocence and Experience tour took place in 2018. I needed to know more about the connection of Bono with William Blake who wrote his illuminated poetry titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the late 18th century.

Here is what Bono had to say in an Interview with Rolling Stones:

What are the common themes that tie the songs on Songs of Experience together?
"I try not to talk about William Blake too much because it sounds pretentious quoting such a literary giant but it was his great idea I pinched to compare the person we become through experience to the person who set out on the journey. If you’re talking about innocence, you’ve probably already lost it but I do believe at the far end of experience, it’s possible to recover it with wisdom. I’m not saying I have much of that but what little I have, I wanted to cram into these songs. I know U2 go into every album like it’s their last one but even more this time I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt. So a lot of the songs are kind of letters, letters to Ali [wife], letters to my sons and daughters, actually our sons and daughters.
...
And one that I didn’t realize until too late that I was writing to myself, “It’s the Little Things Give You Away.” In all of these advice type songs, you are of course preaching what you need to hear. In that sense, they’re all written to the singer. One other piece on Blake, I don’t know if I’m explaining too much here but the best songs for me are often arguments with yourself or arguments with some other version of yourself. Even singing our song “One,” which was half fiction, I’ve had this ongoing fight. In “Little Things,” innocence challenges experience: “I saw you on the stairs, you didn’t notice I was there, that’s cause you were busy talking at me, not to me. You were high above the storm, a hurricane being born but this freedom just might cost you your liberty.”

At the end of the song, experience breaks down and admits his deepest fears, having been called out on it by his younger, braver, bolder self. That same conversation also opens the album with a song called ”Love Is All We Have Left.” My favorite opening line to a U2 album: “There’s nothing to stop this being the best day ever.” In the second verse, innocence admonishes experience: “Now you’re at the other end of the telescope, seven billion stars in her eyes, so many stars so many ways of seeing, hey, this is no time not to be alive.” It’s a chilling moment – in the chorus I was pretending to be Frank Sinatra singing on the moon, a sci-fi torch song “love, love is all we have left, a baby cries on the doorstep, love is all we have left.”

William Blake

Songs of Innocence 

Little Black Boy

Bono quote from the LA Times:

“Songwriting comes from a different place,” he continues. “Music is the language of the spirit. I think ideas and words are our excuse as songwriters to allow our heart or our spirit to run free. That’s when magic happens.”

Dreams, too, come from a different place. We don't own them; they are shared. But the dream of freedom, equality and justice is implemented in individual ways by individuals. Each of us becomes a part of the dream in the way that it can be expressed through us.

Songs of Innocence, SONGS 15, (E 11)
"Laughing Song,
When the green woods laugh, with the voice of joy
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by,
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

When the meadows laugh with lively green
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily,
With their sweet round mouths sing Ha, Ha, He.

When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live & be merry and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of Ha, Ha, He."