With or Without You
U2
Post-punk restraint disguised as a love song, and one of the great examples of a band getting enormous by holding back. The Edge's Infinite Guitar — a sustaining prototype instrument from Michael Brook — produces that keening, bowed line that hovers above everything without ever resolving, while Adam Clayton's bass and Larry Mullen Jr.'s soft, insistent pulse repeat almost unchanged for five minutes. Eno and Lanois built the track as a slow accumulation: nothing happens for a long time, and then everything does at once, and then it withdraws. Bono sings in a strained upper register, the "and you give yourself away" repetitions cracking into something closer to pleading than singing. The lyric is genuinely double-edged — a man torn between marriage and the road, and, in Bono's own telling, between the domestic self and the performing one, with a thorn-and-crown undercurrent of sacrifice. It became The Joshua Tree's first US number one and the definitive slow-dance song for a generation who probably missed how uneasy it is. It suits driving at night more than it suits romance; it's about the impossibility of the thing, not the having of it.
slow
1980s
hovering, spacious, unresolved
Ireland
Rock, Alternative Rock. post-punk influenced rock. Yearning, Uneasy. Holds back in slow accumulation for most of its length before releasing into a strained, pleading peak, then withdrawing again. energy 5. slow. danceability 3. valence 5. vocals: strained upper register, pleading, cracking repetitions. production: Infinite Guitar sustain, repeating bassline, sparse atmospheric build. texture: hovering, spacious, unresolved. acousticness 3. era: 1980s. Ireland. Driving at night, sitting with the impossibility of a thing rather than the having of it