U2 - Cedarwood Road

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by booking.com, and I'm going to go on there right now because I've got a bunch of tour dates coming up between April and June. So I'm putting in the dates. For the first city on my tour, Austin, Texas, and there are over 300 options. There's a huge variety from hotels to vacation rentals.

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With you two, sometimes I write lyrics and then we try to find the music to express those lyrics. But most of the time it's about finding a feeling first and then trying to express that. Blue's rift. powerful and full of rage. It was a natural fit for me to talk about my own rage. That was Bono, lead singer of YouTube, talking about the song Cedar Wood Road. It's named after the street where he grew up in Dublin. He'll talk more about how he channeled his memories to write the lyrics.

But first, we'll hear from the song's co-writer, The Edge. He'll detail the process of creating the track, from the original demo to the final recording made with the other members of YouTube, drummer Larry Mullen Jr., and bassist Adam. Hi, this is The Edge. You two songs can start from any kind of a beginning, a guitar part, a drum part, anything really that excites us and inspires us. Cedarwood Road actually started with a guitar riff that I played at home.

I thought it was pretty exciting. So I got a couple of hours free one morning and I started to try and see where this rift could go. But the problem when you've got a riff like that is okay, great, but how does it become a song? I just thought the only w thing to do is just make a scene change to get away from the rift completely. So the next little bit of composition was the exit from the rift, which is this big kind of a numbskull.

This was like the way to create the full stop for the next sentence. At this point I'm at home, I've got garage band which I use as a kind of sketch pad. And I've got a drum loop of Larry's that I'm using as as a kind of backbeat.

A few years ago we figured out that I was doing all these demos with the drum machines and stuff and Larry said, Well why don't I just make you some drum loops and then you can kinda do whatever the hell you want with them so Larry's been occasionally if he felt like it'd just go in a studio with

an engineer. He just played drums for three hours and like all different tempos, different styles, whatever he was inspired to do. And then they send them to me. And it's just so great for me, you know, when I'm working on a demo I get a Larry Beat and it's always way better than anything I could come up with. And it sounds way better than any drum machine, so it's just a great starting point for me as a writer and a guitar player to have a great backbeat to work over.

My job is really to find a way to inspire Adam and Larry and Bono. So I don't often care to finish out a piece. fully. I just wanna get something down that I think is like a great starting point and then I know that

you know, whatever I come up with they're gonna come up with something better. So I just need to get it going where its identity is clear and it's got some kind of vitality and point of view that's interesting. With this demo was just The riff, the end of the riff and the beginning of the verse.

So we're in the studio I'm playing back this little demo and clearly we need some other sections and I just remember Bono picking up the guitar and he starts just playing this little melodic idea. And I knew that there was something there so I pick up the guitar as well and so the two of So his little motif.

actually becomes the intro to the song and I'm like working on chord changes to try and tie it into what I've already written and What transpires is that that actually becomes the main chorus part and we start trying to come up with new melody ideas that could take the song to some kind of crescendo That's when the song had really been composed as it were and then the lyrics

was the final part of that puzzle. We had an idea for it lyrically. In fact there was a completely different chorus lyric. It was like it had this other identity. But We mixed the song and we kinda listened, lived with it for a while and think we all felt that it really could be taken to another level. So Bonner started trying different ideas for it. And he came up with the idea of writing it about Cedarwood Road, the street that he grew up on.

This is Bono here. I lived on a really nice street. Quite a sweet place. But behind the back garden they began to build the Seven Towers. The Seven Towers were an experiment for Ireland in the seventies and they became the kind of projects of North County Dog. a kid of seven or eight or nine I would go out walking in the fields, but by the time I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, things got a little different.

Kids from the inner city had been forcibly relocated to these seven towers. Communities had been broken up. and people who didn't know each other forced to live together. So they were very unhappy. They were angry, they were annoyed. This were the people that we would meet as young teenagers. and it was very aggressive and so a lot of my early memories of teenage years were of violence and Sheer fear of leaving the house. Going to catch the boy.

I was running down the road, the field was all I knew. I was looking for a soul that's real than I ran into you. My best friend since I was three years old is known to the world as Googie. He came from a family in five Seedwood Road and they were very religious. Their father was like some figure from the Old Testament and he was tough on those kids and so as well as the violence that I was experiencing from the outside and exterior world

And so when I met Googie, I kinda knew instinctively that he would be my comrade. And you make these decisions when you're a kid without even understanding the gravity of them. You know, I I've spent the rest of my life with him. Even to the And friendship once it's one, it's one, it's one.

I can tell you my absolutely favourite bit of the song has nothing to do with my singing or the words. It's Edges guitar song. That has all the dignity of that neighbourhood. Some dark characters indeed, but the general decency of I couldn't Bono loved this solo idea and later on in the process of recording he can't help himself. He starts singing over it.

It's a complicated song now. When Bono instinctively went this is the Cedarwood Road song, suddenly all these musical motifs started to take on a different meaning. the music and the lyric combine in a way that paints a picture that either on their own really couldn't achieve. The kind of malevolent quality of the guitar makes perfect sense in the context of growing up in a very rough part of Dublin as it was then.

Myself and my friends dealt with the kind of skinhead boot boy culture of the time by creating our own reality and eventually our own rock and roll. That's how we dealt with fear that we And when I was writing about Cedar Wood, I was like, The big revelation for me was you can't really leave these things behind because they are who you are. You can never escape your upbringing. You know, there's a part of me that's still there. I'm still on Cedarwood Road.

And now here's Cedarwood Road by U2 in its entirety. I have a new album of my own coming out on April twenty-fourth. It's been about fifteen years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikeshi Herway.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron in Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenn Lilly, and the producer Phil Weinrobe.

I'm gonna be on tour playing in cities across the US starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing. With a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Simeen Nosrat, Jason Manzukis, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken. John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all gonna be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band.

The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to Tickets for the shows on my website, rishices.co, or just go to songexploder.net/slash That's Song Exploder. Thanks. Thanks to Shopify for their support of Song Exploder. When I first started the podcast, it seemed like I had to figure out everything on my own, booking interviews, making the artwork, making the website, and every day there was a new question that needed an answer.

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My name is Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Thanks for listening.