Set for publication on November 1st is Bono's memoir, titled, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Each chapter is based around the title of a specific U2 song and features hand drawings by the singer.
Rolling Stone quoted Bono as explaining the brief of Surrender: “When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs. The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the Seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress. . . With a fair amount of fun along the way.”
In the chapter titled “Out Of Control,” Bono writes: “Why go all the way to Timbuktu as a war correspondent when there’s so much good material under my bed? The fears and specters under my pillow. The reasons I sometimes don’t want to get out of bed. I don’t yet know that rock and roll — punk rock in particular — will prove my liberation. That it will end my occupation of my bed.”
Whether it's revisiting a 30-year-old album on tour of looking back to his childhood, Bono recently explained that the past always remains firmly a part of the present: “Y'know, part of you never leaves the street you grew up in. And it's a beautiful street with beautiful people. I'm still best friends with a lot of people on Ceadarwood Road — but, y'know, I still have that attitude that you walk out the door with — I have it now — and there actually nobody waitin' for me (laughs) to smack my head in.”
A while back, Bono told us that a key idea for U2 now is the search for grace in a world that makes it very difficult to achieve: “It's a powerful idea, grace. It really is. And, y'know, we hear so much of karma and so little of grace. Every religion teaches us about karma and, well, what you put out you will receive. And even Christianity, which is supposed to be about grace, has turned, y'know, redemption into good manners, or the right accent, or, y'know, good works or whatever it is. I just can't get over grace — (it's) so hard to find.”