Somewhere around the middle of U2’s Singapore concert in 2019, Bono paused to tell us that we had reached the point where, had we been listening to The Joshua Tree on cassette, we would now turn the tape over to Side B.
I found this disproportionately amusing.
It was such a specifically Gen X thing to say. Not “we’re halfway through the album”, or “now for the second half”. No. We had reached the moment when the cassette mechanism clicked, the music stopped, and somebody had to remove a small plastic rectangle from the machine, turn it over and press Play again.
There was a time when an album required minor physical maintenance.
The Singapore concerts were U2’s first performances here, staged at the National Stadium on 30 November and 1 December 2019. The centrepiece was a complete performance of The Joshua Tree in its original running order, surrounded by earlier and later songs from the band’s catalogue. It was a long-delayed arrival: Singapore had waited more than four decades for U2, and the band turned up carrying its most monumental album with it.
Bono’s cassette remark worked because everyone of a certain age understood precisely what he meant. Side A ended with “Running to Stand Still”. Side B began with “Red Hill Mining Town”. There was an actual break in the journey — not one invented by an algorithm, a playlist or an impatient thumb reaching for Skip, but built into the object itself. The album’s official sequence places those songs fifth and sixth, while contemporary commentary also identifies “Running to Stand Still” as the close of the original first side.
It was a joke about an obsolete format, but it also revealed something important about The Joshua Tree. This is an album with two distinct landscapes.
Side A is the U2 that filled stadiums and conquered radio. Side B is the U2 that wandered farther into the desert.
Before the tree became a monument
Released on 9 March 1987, The Joshua Tree was U2’s fifth studio album. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois returned as producers after working with the band on The Unforgettable Fire, with Flood involved in recording and Steve Lillywhite handling the final mix. Although Windmill Lane Studios is listed among its recording locations, Bono later recalled that several songs emerged in less formal surroundings, including Larry Mullen Jr’s spare bedroom and Adam Clayton’s living room.
That domestic beginning is worth remembering because the finished record sounds anything but domestic. It sounds as though it were recorded beneath enormous skies.
U2 had already learned how to make grand gestures. War had given them “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “New Year’s Day”. The Unforgettable Fire had introduced a more atmospheric and impressionistic sound, along with “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. By 1987, the band had enough ambition to attempt something vast but enough experience to understand that vastness needs empty space around it.
Eno and Lanois helped them find that space.
The drums are powerful without constantly demanding attention. Adam Clayton’s bass often moves with an almost patient certainty. The Edge rarely behaves like a conventional rock guitarist; he creates weather, distance and architecture. Bono, meanwhile, sings as though every private doubt has somehow acquired geopolitical importance.
That last quality would eventually make U2 easy to mock. There is always a risk when a singer appears to address God, America, romantic love, heroin addiction and military intervention with roughly the same furrowed brow.
On The Joshua Tree, however, the scale still feels earned.
Looking at America from somewhere else
The album is commonly described as U2’s engagement with America, but it is not quite an American album. It is an Irish band’s idea of America: part landscape, part mythology, part warning.
The Library of Congress describes the record as being inspired by America’s myths, ideals and contradictions — its beauty and expansiveness set against violence, loneliness and political distortion. The album was added to the US National Recording Registry in 2013, recognised as a culturally significant work rather than merely a commercially successful one.
That distance mattered. U2 were fascinated by gospel, blues, folk, country music, the desert, religious imagery and the idea of America as both sanctuary and empire. They were attracted to the promise but suspicious of the sales pitch.
The album does not offer a single argument about America. Instead, it behaves like someone driving across it at night, catching fragments through the windscreen: illuminated cities, empty roads, revival tents, military aircraft, motel rooms, mining communities and borderlands.
The title itself helped to turn the record into an object of myth. Anton Corbijn photographed the band against the stark landscapes of the American West, avoiding the glossy colour and decorative excess associated with much of late-1980s pop culture. The Joshua tree — a desert plant named by settlers who thought its branches resembled the biblical Joshua raising his arms — became a ready-made symbol of endurance, faith and survival in inhospitable ground.
The cover still works because the band do not appear to be enjoying the scenery. They look cold, tired and faintly suspicious of the entire enterprise.
Very sensible.
Where the streets begin
Few albums announce themselves as effectively as The Joshua Tree.
“Where the Streets Have No Name” does not simply start. It appears on the horizon.
The organ-like introduction slowly gathers shape. The Edge’s guitar arrives in repeating patterns. Clayton and Mullen establish forward motion, and then Bono enters with the urge to escape — not necessarily from a physical place, but from identities, divisions and histories that seem to have been assigned before anyone had a chance to object.
The song promises somewhere beyond labels. Naturally, it never provides directions.
That is part of its power. It is a song about arrival built entirely around yearning. Even after the full band comes in, the music never feels settled. It keeps reaching.
Live, it becomes almost architectural. At the Singapore concert, the massive screen and stadium staging enlarged it further, but the song does not truly depend on spectacle. The spectacle was already inside the recording.
“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” follows, and the title alone could serve as U2’s entire artistic manifesto.
The music borrows from gospel, but the lyric refuses the conventional comfort of spiritual certainty. Faith exists, but so does continuing hunger. Bono sings of belief, sacrifice and release, then returns to the admission that the search remains unfinished. The song reached number one in America, becoming the album’s second US chart-topping single.
For a hugely successful rock band, this is an interesting position to take. The song does not say, “I have found the truth and will now explain it to you.” It says that revelation has not eliminated doubt.
This is where Bono’s earnestness works best. He is not preaching from the destination. He is still somewhere on the road, possibly with a map he cannot fold correctly.
With, without and somewhere in between
“With or Without You” is one of those songs that has been played so often that it can be difficult to hear it as a piece of music rather than as part of the atmosphere.
It is simply there: on radio stations, romantic compilations, film soundtracks, karaoke lists and the emotional support playlists of several generations.
Yet the recording remains remarkably restrained.
The bassline establishes the mood. The guitar seems to hover rather than strike. Larry Mullen Jr does not force the drama too early. Bono’s vocal keeps climbing towards a release that never completely arrives.
The title sounds like a declaration of devotion until one listens closely. This is not a comfortable love song. It is about dependence, surrender, frustration and the inability to resolve two opposing needs. The Library of Congress essay describes it as exploring both earthly and spiritual love, built around tension rather than romantic fulfilment. It became U2’s first number-one single in the United States.
The genius of the song is that the music understands what the lyric cannot solve. It expands and contracts, rises and withdraws. Even at its emotional peak, there is no clean victory.
Love remains in the room. So does the problem.
When the sky turns blue
The first three tracks could easily have formed a respectable greatest-hits package by themselves. Then “Bullet the Blue Sky” arrives and sets fire to the landscape.
It is one of the most severe transitions on any major 1980s rock album. The openness of “With or Without You” is replaced by Larry Mullen Jr’s martial rhythm, Adam Clayton’s threatening bass and The Edge producing sounds that appear to have been dragged through metal.
The song grew out of Bono’s response to conflict in El Salvador and US involvement in Central America. According to the Library of Congress essay, Bono asked The Edge to put the sound of a war-torn El Salvador through his amplifier. The result is less a conventional guitar part than an air raid conducted with six strings.
Bono adopts the language of American religious broadcasting, military power and financial transaction, mixing scripture with the smell of money. It is theatrical, certainly. At points it is nearly a spoken-word performance with a rock band operating heavy machinery behind it.
But the excess suits the subject.
“Bullet the Blue Sky” also exposes one of the tensions that would follow U2 throughout their career. The band were four successful Europeans using enormous concert platforms to condemn violence, inequality and political hypocrisy. Admirers saw moral commitment. Critics saw sanctimony.
Both reactions are understandable.
U2’s politics can be broad, and Bono has never been frightened of delivering a sermon to people who mainly came to hear the chorus. Yet on this recording, the band’s anger is too physical to be dismissed as mere posturing. The rhythm section makes the argument before the words do.
Running without moving
After the force of “Bullet the Blue Sky”, “Running to Stand Still” lowers its voice.
The song concerns heroin addiction and the social bleakness surrounding Dublin’s Ballymun Flats, represented in the lyric by the seven towers. What begins like an attempt to escape gradually reveals itself as another form of confinement.
The arrangement is sparse: piano, guitar, harmonica and a vocal that seems to know shouting would only make matters worse.
It is among Bono’s most controlled performances. He observes rather than announces. The images are vivid but not overloaded. A woman tries to move forward, but every act of movement returns her to the same place.
The title is perfect because it describes more than addiction. It captures the exhausting modern condition of constant effort without meaningful progress. Work harder, move faster, keep up, remain available, produce more — and somehow discover that you have not gone anywhere.
In 1987, the song was about a specific person in a specific environment. It has not become less recognisable.
Then the music stops.
The cassette reaches its end.
Somewhere in Singapore in 2019, Bono tells us it is time to turn it over.
Side B: beyond the famous three
The popular memory of The Joshua Tree is heavily weighted towards its beginning. Those opening tracks are so enormous that the rest of the album sometimes feels like territory beyond the tourist route.
This is unfair to Side B, though not entirely surprising.
Side A presents the clearest version of U2’s monumental sound. Side B is less immediately accessible. It is more varied, occasionally rougher and not as perfectly sequenced. It asks the listener to keep travelling after the landmarks have passed.
On cassette, that effort was literal. You had to choose to continue.
“Red Hill Mining Town” begins the second side with a song inspired by the damage caused to communities and families during the British miners’ strike. The Library of Congress essay describes it as a portrait of civil conflict entering close-knit communities and private relationships.
The music is muscular, but the lyric is intimate. Political pressure is felt through domestic fracture: people trying to hold together while the economic ground disappears beneath them.
Bono pushes his voice hard, perhaps harder than the song comfortably allows. That strain is partly why it works. He sounds like someone hanging on because letting go is not yet an acceptable option.
For years, “Red Hill Mining Town” remained one of the album’s less familiar live songs. By performing The Joshua Tree in sequence during the anniversary tours, U2 forced it out of the shadow cast by the opening singles. The full-album format gave Side B its proper entrance at last.
Dust, wire and temporary relief
“In God’s Country” is leaner and more immediate. The guitars shimmer, the drums move briskly, and Bono continues examining America as promise, illusion and spiritual testing ground.
It is one of the album’s most efficient songs. Nothing stays long enough to become heavy. Its images pass like scenery seen from a moving vehicle.
“Trip Through Your Wires” loosens things further. It draws from blues, country and roots music, with Bono playing harmonica and the band sounding briefly as though they have found a roadside bar that will tolerate them.
It is not one of the album’s essential songs, but I would not remove it.
Without it, The Joshua Tree might become oppressively solemn. The track allows a little sweat, flirtation and untidiness into a record otherwise occupied by spiritual longing, political violence and people being crushed by history.
Not every stop on a serious journey needs to contain a revelation. Sometimes there is just a harmonica and a questionable metaphor.
A tree for the absent
“One Tree Hill” is where Side B finds its emotional centre.
The song was written in memory of Greg Carroll, a young New Zealander who became part of U2’s touring organisation and Bono’s personal assistant. Carroll died in a motorcycle accident in Dublin in 1986. The song also invokes Chilean musician and activist Víctor Jara, murdered following Augusto Pinochet’s military coup.
These two forms of loss — one personal, one political — could have sat awkwardly together. Instead, the song connects them through the idea of memory continuing like water.
The band do not attempt to make grief tidy. The music rises, but the loss remains.
“One Tree Hill” also reveals something central to U2’s best work. The band frequently moves between the individual and the historical, sometimes recklessly. A private death opens onto political murder. A failing relationship becomes a spiritual crisis. A street becomes a border. A desert becomes a moral landscape.
At their worst, these leaps can feel inflated. Here, they feel instinctive.
The song understands that grief does not respect categories. We remember the people we knew alongside people we never met but whose stories entered our lives. The scale changes. The ache does not.
The darkness before the final track
“Exit” is the album’s most unsettling recording.
It begins in near-darkness, with a pulse gradually forming beneath Bono’s voice. The song appears to enter the mind of a man moving towards violence. Unlike “Bullet the Blue Sky”, there is no political framework to provide distance. The danger is intimate, unstable and close.
The band builds the track through atmosphere rather than explanation. Guitar noise breaks through and recedes. The rhythm gathers force. Bono shifts between narration and possession.
It is not designed to be pleasant, and it makes no attempt to redeem its subject.
Placed near the end of the record, “Exit” feels like the point where the American journey loses the road entirely. The earlier songs searched for spiritual release, love, justice or escape. Here, the search has collapsed into pathology.
Then comes “Mothers of the Disappeared”.
The closing song was inspired by women in Argentina, Chile and El Salvador whose children were abducted or killed under military regimes. Rather than ending with another stadium-sized declaration, U2 withdraw into rhythm, drone and whispered grief.
It is an extraordinary choice for the final track.
There is no triumphant resolution. The missing do not return. The mothers receive no adequate explanation. The music becomes a vigil, gradually fading without suggesting that the story is complete.
For an album containing some of the largest rock songs of its decade, The Joshua Tree ends quietly enough to make you lean towards the speakers.
What still works
The album’s greatest strength is its sense of scale.
U2 understood that “big” does not have to mean constantly loud. The songs feel enormous because the arrangements leave room around them. The Edge’s guitars establish distance. Clayton and Mullen provide movement without filling every available space. Eno and Lanois allow atmosphere to become part of the instrumentation.
The album also has one of the strongest opening sequences in popular music. “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You” do not sound interchangeable, yet they form a coherent ascent: escape, search and emotional contradiction.
Then, instead of repeating the formula, the record becomes darker.
Its sincerity has also aged better than might have been expected. There is nothing coy about The Joshua Tree. It does not protect itself with irony. U2 believe these subjects matter and accept the risk of looking faintly ridiculous for saying so.
After several decades of brands, politicians and public figures communicating through carefully tested fragments of synthetic relatability, old-fashioned earnestness no longer seems like the worst cultural crime.
Where the branches creak
The album is not beyond criticism.
Side B is less consistent than Side A. “Trip Through Your Wires” is enjoyable but comparatively slight. “In God’s Country” is evocative without reaching the emotional depth of the best material. The sequence after “Running to Stand Still” can feel like a collection of fascinating roads rather than one inevitable route.
Bono’s writing also has a habit of turning complex political histories into large symbolic images. This can be effective within a four-minute song, but it sometimes reduces people and conflicts to scenery in U2’s moral landscape.
There is also the matter of grandeur. Listeners who are allergic to rock stars behaving as though a concert is part revival meeting, part United Nations session will find plenty here to test their patience.
I understand the resistance. Bono does occasionally sing as though the person in the back row might be personally responsible for resolving Central American foreign policy.
Yet the album’s ambition is inseparable from its flaws. A more restrained Joshua Tree might have been more tasteful, but it would not have been The Joshua Tree.
The album that changed their scale
Commercially, the record transformed U2 from a successful international band into one of the largest rock acts in the world. It entered the US album chart at number seven, reached number one three weeks later and became their first American number-one album. It also topped charts across several other countries and eventually received Diamond certification in the United States.
At the 1988 Grammy Awards, The Joshua Tree won Album of the Year, defeating a field that included Michael Jackson’s Bad, Prince’s Sign o’ the Times, Whitney Houston’s Whitney and the Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris collaboration Trio.
Those details matter, but they do not fully explain the album’s endurance.
Plenty of successful records remain trapped in their release year. The Joshua Tree still creates a landscape when it begins. The production may belong recognisably to U2, but it does not feel sealed inside 1987.
Its questions remain open because they were never particularly fashionable questions. How do you sustain faith without certainty? What happens when political violence reaches ordinary homes? Can love survive the demands placed upon it? Can a person escape an identity imposed by history? What does a powerful nation look like from outside its borders?
And, beneath all of that: what exactly are we still looking for?
Turning the tape over again
When U2 finally performed in Singapore, the anniversary format could easily have become a museum exercise: four ageing musicians carefully preserving the record that made them enormous.
It did not feel that way to me.
Hearing the album in sequence restored its shape. The familiar songs arrived first, but the concert required us to stay for the difficult second half: the miners, the bereaved friend, the murderer, the mothers waiting for children who would never return.
And there, between “Running to Stand Still” and “Red Hill Mining Town”, Bono gave us the old instruction.
This is where you flip the cassette.
It was amusing because it belonged to another era. We once knew albums through their physical limits: the end of a side, the soft clunk of a cassette deck, the pause before the music returned. That physical relationship with music turns up elsewhere in my own listening history too — in the INXS greatest-hits cassette that became a time capsule, and in returning to Enya after years away, where the missing tapes matter almost as much as the songs I can still remember.
Streaming removed that interruption. Everything now proceeds smoothly, endlessly and without requiring us to leave the chair.
Convenient, certainly.
But I sometimes miss the pause.
The small silence between the two halves of The Joshua Tree gives the album room to change. Side A ends with someone running but going nowhere. Side B begins in a community being pulled apart. The tape turns, the perspective shifts, and the road becomes less certain.
More than three decades after its release, The Joshua Tree remains a record about searching through contradictions: faith and doubt, devotion and resentment, America as dream and America as machinery, music as entertainment and music as witness.
It begins by imagining a place where the streets have no names.
It ends with the names of the disappeared hanging in the air.
Then the cassette clicks, and there is nothing left to do but turn it over and begin again.
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