Three more sleeps and then it comes out: the big episodic bio “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story” by Bono, which will be released in the UK on Tuesday 1st November 2022. The German translation is already 24 hours later (02.11.) in stores between Flensburg and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Various English-language media, including the daily newspaper “Guardian” and “NME”, are already serving up bites from the more than 600-page epic.
In a recent interview with the US radio network NPR on the publication of the book, the 62-year-old talks about his voice, which has changed several times over the course of U2’s long career. A key experience and voice game changer would have been the death of his father Bob Hewson from cancer in 2000.
After his death, the voice would have “opened” and changed the pitch. “There’s a physiological reason for this,” says Bono. The singer had a difficult to tumultuous relationship with his father.
The singer called this shift an “unscientific theory…read: a folksy idea that when someone you love dies, a change happens.” Speaking to NPR, he looks back and forward: “When you’re a more relaxed person, you open up the voice too.”
And further: “Especially in the last few years I have sung in a way that I could never have imagined!”. He recounted his very domineering father, who dismissed him as “a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor.”
When asked what that might say about his personality, Vox replied that it was probably an analogy to ambition and fighting for one’s status.
Elsewhere in the interview, Bono spoke about his faith, which he described as Judeo-Christian values. That would be related to a general sense of spirituality and far less to specific religious practices.
Musically, that manifested itself in that he wrote some U2 songs in gospel mode, such as the smash hit “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” from the 1987 album “The Joshua Tree”.
Ultimately, he pondered why he chose the word “surrender” (roughly: “surrender”) for the title of his new book. Perhaps as a counterpoint to his generally combative nature. According to Bono, he would have been born with his “fists raised”.