To promote the release of Songs of Experience, U2 recorded a special at Abbey Road Studios in London, where they were joined by a choir and an orchestra. You can watch four songs from U2 at the BBC, with “Beautiful Day” above and “Get Out of Your Own Way,” “With or Without You” and “All I Want is You” below.

Songs of Experience is a companion title to their previous release, Songs of Innocence – but it was delayed by nearly a year after the band began to feel that what they’d done no longer reflected the environment around them. “It’s hard to quantify, but I would say the emotional temperature is up about 25 percent,” frontman Bono said in September.

“There’s a couple of reasons why we delayed Songs of Experience. The world around us was certainly changing out of all recognition. We nearly lost the European Union, something that has helped keep the peace in our region for nearly 70 years. You’ve had the same sort of disaffection in the United States, with the rise of a new kind of constituency. People on both the left and right have lost faith in political process. These sentiments are easily played and manipulated by the likes of Donald Trump.

“In a world where people feel bulled by their circumstance, sometimes people fall prey to a bully of their own. Lots of people around me, both conservative and liberal, feel this is one of those defining moments in their lives. After the election, some people on the left were almost grieving. When I tried to understand, I realized there was a kind of mourning for innocence that was lost. For the first time in many years, maybe in our lifetime, the moral arc of the universe, as Dr. King used to call it, was not bending in the direction of fairness, equality and justice for all.”

Watch Clips From 'U2 at the BBC'

 

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