15. U2 - Achtung Baby

U2 were an incredibly important band when it comes to my personal musical development, which can be a hard thing to admit nowadays what with Bono writing Spider-Man musicals and whathaveyou. But again, I feel it is necessary to be honest here.

Achtung Baby was the first album I ever cared about. That’s heavy, I think. Before U2 I was a semi-avid fan of the Offspring, Sugar Ray, and the musical Rent. U2 changed all that. Upon my first experience hearing Achtung Baby, countless seeds were sown - not only did it eventually lead me to the Beatles (they covered “Help” live before a performance of “Ultraviolet,” which pushed me to steal a bunch of Beatles CDs from my parents), but a laundry list of bands/albums I would come to love in the following years. Brian Eno (who co-produced this record), Talking Heads, Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, the Ramones, etc. etc. The list goes on. Achtung Baby was, for better or for worse, the beginning of my obsession with rock music.

As for the album itself? I still dig it. A few tracks haven’t aged particularly well for me (“The Fly” is not nearly as cool as I once thought) but there is a lot of greatness here. The big songs are still big (“One,” “Even Better Than The Real Thing”, etc etc) but I’ve come to really appreciate the album tracks that don’t get much love, particularly the lovely piano dirge “So Cruel” and the laid-back “Tryin To Throw Your Arms Around The World.” Not to mention the song I have posted here, “Ultraviolet (Light My Way),” one of U2’s most underrated emotional arena-rockers and a staple of my melodramatic 16-year-old listening habits. Hearing it now brings back inimitable flashes of me sitting alone in my basement room, on my bed, with only the bed-side light on. Very personal.