By JJT (written for ThinkChristian.com)

Songs of Experience may be full of big, grinning, sometimes dumb rock, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Somehow, when my grandpa laid a cliche on me, it still hit home. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” he’d say. Or, “To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail.” Grandpa had earned his wisdom by old-fashioned experience, and he spread it out in little installments over many decades. Though his sayings may have been familiar, the circumstances that he applied them to were always changing. We didn’t look to Grandpa for cutting-edge fashion advice or commentary on recent musical trends. He was above all that. He didn’t need to seek relevance; he was transcendent.

I’m not sure if the members of U2 are grandparents yet, but they are certainly old enough to be. With the release of Songs of Experience, the band members embrace their elder status as they offer up songs and sentiments they feel the world needs. We may roll our eyes from time to time, but just as with Grandpa, as soon as the story ends I want to hear it again.

This long-delayed set is presented as a companion to 2014’s Songs of Innocence. The two-album collection is clearly informed by and loosely patterned after William Blake’s two-volume set of poetry, Songs of Innocence and Experience. Bono has leaned on Blake as a Romanticist role model for many years. His Zoo TV character/persona The Fly, likely inspired by the poem of the same name in Blake’s work, evolved into the devilish MacPhisto character, who was also clearly informed by C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. Back then Bono used characters and costumes to critique the culture and reveal the human condition. Now he simply looks us in the face and tells us how it is.

U2 blamed some of this album’s delay on the startling lurch toward fear-based and regressive political ideology on display in both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. It was a world moment, the band felt, that called for some of their particular type of commentary. Anyone expecting protest songs similar to “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Bullet the Blue Sky,” though, will come away disappointed with Songs of Experience. U2 is interested in plumbing the emotional, psychological, sociological, and even theological depths of the human mind and heart for the seeds of brokenness, and then preaching faith and hope and love into those dark places. Bono is, as Paul instructs in Ephesians 4:15, speaking the truth in love. He seems to be trying to address the root instead of the fruit.

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