[Podcast] U2 and the Dawn of Skinhead Culture

July 1, 2015, 11:15am

Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians deconstruct their songs and tell the stories behind how they were made. In the past, it’s explored tracks from The Arcade Fire’s Will Butler to Game of Thrones‘ theme music and more. In the newest episode, musician, creator, and host Hrishikesh Hirway and U2’s Bono and The Edge break down “Cedarwood Road” from the band’s newest album, Songs of Innocence (Island Records).

10 Cedarwood Road is the address of Bono’s childhood home in Dublin. For the U2 song “Cedarwood Road,” Bono looked back to his life there as a teenager, when skinhead culture seeped into his neighborhood via the Seven Towers, housing projects that were built around that time. Previously, The Creators Project teamed up with U2 to launch Every Breaking Wave, director Aoife McArdle’s visual essay of U2’s song of the same name. The short film tells the story of a young skinhead growing up in Northern Ireland in the midst of The Troubles.

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In this episode of the Song Exploder podcast, Bono traces the arc from those memories to the lyrics of “Cedarwood Road,” and The Edge breaks down the process of how the music was written, with the original demo and the isolated tracks from the final recording. Hear it in full below:

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Referenced in this episode: Bono’s best friend is Guggi, a visual artist who grew up at 5 Cedarwood Road.

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