Bradley Morgan (2:00)

It's a pleasure, and thank you so much for having me.

Latoya Johnson (2:02)

Latoya, awesome. In 2021, you published U2's the Joshua Planting Roots in Mythic America, about the Irish band's sociocultural and socioeconomic perspective on the US through their 1987 album the Joshua Tree. How did this project come about? Was it an extension of that book or was this just a new whole new entirely creative endeavor?

Bradley Morgan (2:31)

Well, it does kind of have a little bit of roots in that book because I had originally wrote that book as a pitch to 33 and a third, and I kept getting consistently rejected. So I was trying really hard to get it published elsewhere because I felt you two were important, were important enough, and I felt the album was important enough to discuss on its own, but also not only just about the album itself at the time when it was made, but also its ongoing relevance amidst the Trump administration when they toured it for his 30th anniversary. And in between, when the pitch was submitted. And when the results came in, a friend of mine had recommended to me, you know, just go ahead and just write the book. And so I wrote the whole first draft without knowing what was going to happen with it. And when I did get turned down for 33 and a third and I just tried to pitch it elsewhere and I wasn't getting a lot of responses to it, I thought maybe, you know, maybe this is too specific. What if I have something that is just more general about you too? And I whipped up a quick outline for what would become this book. And nobody was interested in that either. So it just. It just sat on my heart hard drive for the longest time. And then a few years later, when I was working on my book about Frank Zappa and his response to the rise and proliferation of. Of white Christian nationalism, you know, they. They say when you work on your second book, it's easier. And it's easier in the sense that you are more familiarized with the process. But when you go from one book to a topic that is a lot more esoteric and a lot more difficult for. For people to appreciate, you know, not a lot of people were interested in that for a while as well. And so when I was getting kind of, you know, unsure about what was going to happen with the Zappa book, I had someone reach out to me about a possible U2 compendium. And they said, you know, if you're interested in this, would you, you know, would you. Could you submit an outline? And I already had an outline. So this book came out of. Just unsure of what other projects were going to be doing at that time, and trying to be flexible. And so I had been kind of just sitting on it for a few years at that point.

Latoya Johnson (4:50)

Well, going through the book felt like just delicious nostalgia. You know, you're just being transported back to U2's origins. And the photos are. They're Chef's Kiss, especially the ones from the early years. You have these four young people at the beginning of their professional lives discovering their sound and what they wanted their music to. You know, Bonnet has a mullet. We see Adam as a bleached blonde. They are curly hair. Yes, it's curly hair. They're just babies. What was the process like for you as you sifted through the photos, selecting just the right ones to convey your message?

Bradley Morgan (5:32)

Well, I wish I could take credit for those photos, but it was actually someone at the publisher named Claire Brown who did an absolutely fantastic job with those photos. But in the course of writing the book, it was original. The contract was. Was originally signed with the publisher called Palazzo, but Palazzo had been sold to another company and it folded. So now when the book was published, it was Gemini. And she had come on about halfway, you know, a little bit more towards the end of the project, and got photos. When I saw the first draft, the photos were good, and there was a lot of photos that I liked in there, but they didn't match the text, and that was a really big thing for me. And so I had a lot of dialogue with Claire about matching the text to that and really kind of building the story through the images itself. So the photo selection, for the most part, was Claire's. I did provide some feedback on a few things, but really, I give a lot of kudos to her and to Gemini Books at Large for really taking seriously the content of the work, especially during such a time as, like, a, you know, a publisher buyout. And the fact that it all came together and it looks beautiful, too, is. Is really great. And I see that as we all came together to try to tell the story from our, you know, from. From our different vantage points. And it really was a team effort in that regard.

Latoya Johnson (6:58)

Oh, yes. Well, the photos are absolutely magnificent. And, you know, the. It blends storytelling, the visual imagery, and critical analysis about the band's entire discography from their debut album, Boy in 1980, to 2023's Songs of Surrender. So how. And you can tell that you're reading by reading the book. You can tell that you're a huge fan of the band. And so what was it like for you to balance being an admirer while also assessing their body of work?

Bradley Morgan (7:33)

Well, originally, I envisioned something. I envisioned something that was going to be a little bit more critical because my book on the Joshua Tree and my book on Frank Zappa are very deep analytical analyses on culture and. And. And social situations and politics. And I really didn't have the confidence that I could do a much more broader book on. On YouTube. And I was wanting to think that maybe I. I could do something different with this. And so one thing I did that I didn't do for the first two books was that I would submit chapters to the publisher as I was writing them, because my first two books, I had to write those in their entirety before publishers would look at them. So this was the first time where I actually had a contract in hand and I could work on it as I went. And there's five chapters in the book because I structure each chapter around different periods surrounding a trio of different albums. So chapter One about their earlier years is about their first three albums. Boy, October War. The second chapter is when they start expanding their sound. And that's Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree. And when I submitted the first chapter, it was a lot more analytical. And my pub and the publisher, when it was still Palazzo at the time, was like, okay, let's have a conversation about this. And so we had. We talked about what was working, what didn't work, and, you know, ultimately they were right. But I just. I think I needed to kind of get that a little bit out of my system to move forward. And in trying to tell that story, coming from the very difficult subject matter of the Zappa book, and I keep mentioning that one because both those came out the same year, like the Zappa one just came out four months prior. And following the really difficult subject matter of that one, writing this book on YouTube became a journey of rediscovering joy. And so in that, I wanted to find as much joy as I possibly could in their music, but. But provide, you know, as as much content and information as I could that wasn't just like, oh, here's album by album, or like, stories behind the songs kind of books, which are all great, but I wanted to tell a much larger, bigger picture story of them. And to do so, try to get in as much as I possibly could, biography, analysis, overviews of their songs, their tours, and do so in a much more methodical way. And it really helped that I'd already have that kind of outline structure to really break the. Break the book down by covering trios of albums at a time than I would if I had just done one at a time. Because it allowed me an opportunity to kind of sharpen certain edges while softening others. Because, I mean, there's some aspects of their career that are much larger than others. You know, obviously I wrote a whole book on the Joshua Tree, but I didn't want those big moments in their career to be so dominating. And I wanted to give as much credence to the lower parts of their career and try to be as equal to all the material as possible in telling that story. Well.

Latoya Johnson (10:43)

You tell it well. Just wonderful. As I was reading through it, I was like, oh, I can't imagine how difficult it was to love a band and love their music and have to critically assess certain historical aspects of the work that they've done. And so I feel like you did it beautifully. Speaking of that, I love the final line of the book. For myself and for many others, you two will be there until the End of the World. And so the title references the song from the band's 1991 album, UK Tongue Baby, which has a spiritual biblical theme. And I was wondering, how did you arrive at until the End of the World as the defining phrase of the book, as opposed to Walk on or the Unforgettable Fire?

Bradley Morgan (11:37)

Right, so with Palazzo, with, with, with these books, they wanted the song, they wanted the, the book title to be the title of a song. And there are other entries from the publisher, like Annie Zaleski's got a Lady Gaga book called Applause. She also has a pink book called like Raise a Glass. And when I was looking at different titles, you know, some stood out more than others. I certainly couldn't call the book u 2bad because that wouldn't send the right message. But when I was looking at the remaining titles, there were some that were too. That evoked too much of a specific time period or specific album. And until the End of the World, which was not a single. It's one of their, you know, best songs. And it's a. And it's a very beloved song in the fan community, but it didn't exactly convey a particular period or a particular album. And when I was thinking about, you know, a title that would encompass a 50 year history of a band and a band that has managed to stay together, like all the members together during that whole time, you know, there's, you know, I wanted to emphasize that longevity. And until the End of the World was the one that really kind of stood out for me. And, you know, we don't know what's gonna happen with them in the future, but whatever happens, you know, I'm here for it. And it's, it's exciting.

Latoya Johnson (12:55)

It is. Yes, it is. And speaking of their longevity, what stands out is the fact that they've been together for so long, there hasn't been a carousel of members. The same group we got on Boy is. The same lineup we've had, we have had for the last 45 years of their album making. In chapter three, you write about the global sociopolitical events of the late 80s and early 90s. And that produced a creative shift with Bono and the Edge. And their creative shift didn't necessarily include Adam and Larry, the bassist and drummer for the band. And for other bands, I feel like that would have ended them, but not for you too. And so was there any point while you were writing and researching where you thought, how was it possible that this band, through everything that they've been through, how is it possible that they've maintained the band well.

Bradley Morgan (14:04)

They've been friends since they were, since they were kids at Mount Temple Comprehensive, since they were teenagers. And there's a lot of love. And when you have that kind of shared upbringing and shared cultural references and shared community, that creates bonds that are really tight. Larry had put up a notice at school. You know, drummers seek musicians to form band and from there it all just kind of just fell into place. And certainly they went through a lot of changes during that first decade in the 80s they went from being a new wave post punk band to, you know, broadening their musical horizons and aesthetics with the Unforgettable Fire, the Joshua Tree. But by the end of the 80s as they were just massively successful and you know they're, they're a band that has a bit of a self consciousness to them where once something kind of works, sometimes they, they, they push it a little bit too far. And so with Rattle and Hum they started getting their first taste of actual criticism against, you know, what they were doing, you know, with their music and with the film. Because they were in, in the band's view kind of turning into like this American show band. Like they got gone so far into the American mythos of what that meant to them as Irishmen growing up in Ireland in the 70s to kind of losing themselves along the way. Bono talks about in the documentary from the sky down that, you know, you know, that the Irish didn't even recognize them anymore. So they had a bit of a crisis of confidence and it almost did break the band, you know, as the Berlin Wall fell down and you know, all this new music started coming in for a new decade. You know, that really was juxtaposed with the somber stone faced, dour looking men in these black and white photos from just a few years earlier. Things are opening up, things are colorful. Technology is promising a, a potential utopia through the rise of the Internet and the connection that it can happen from then. I mean, look what happened. But you know, and certainly they were, they were really opening up to what was inspiring them. And Bono and the Edge were really into a lot of the electronic dance music that was coming out of Europe, especially Germany at the time. But Adam and Larry, who really liked what they had been doing, were more interested in kind of maintaining that, that root in, in rock music. And it really did almost break them walls were coming up between the band and when they were recording Octung Baby in, in Berlin, it was, you know, gray, cloudy, winter time. You know, they're not feeling great, you know, there's a lot of arguments about the direction of the music. Bono's not liking how Adam was playing his bass, and there's a story where Adam just gives Bono the bass, says, you know what, you play it better. But it was when they were kind of jamming together that the basis of the song One started to form. And it was that song that really kind of brought the band back together into the shared common language. I mean, I thought maybe the book could be called one at some point, but you know, going back to that evokes too much particular time period. You know, that's that was really a saving grace for them. And I think we benefit. I think we all benefited from that because they made a brilliant album.

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Latoya Johnson (18:53)

You've written two books about a band whose work connects music with morality, spirituality, politics and social movements. And I'm intrigued with whether there has been a shift in your personal beliefs and your worldview as you've as you've written about U2.

Bradley Morgan (19:14)

Well, three of the members of the band Adam, not Adam, sorry Larry, Bono and the Edge are deeply religious people. There's stories about how the band almost broke up in the early 80s because of their faith. Adam is not as particularly religious. And you know, I, I'm not a very religious person either. But you know, I really gravitate towards U2's music and messaging because there is a, there's a humanism, there's a, there's a, there's a commonality in what they're communicating through their music that I really appreciate. You know, I, I'm a really big believer in the concept of grace, you know, just as a kind of just larger idea that we could transcend a lot of our pain and suffering if we just practice grace and forgiveness and not fall into this kind of eye for an eye mentality. And I take a lot of those lessons from them. That's been very formative for me. And when they sing about it, it does come from a very spiritual place because they are very religious men. But you know, we have so much more in common than just a particular faith. And these are all ideas that, that we can share and that we all benefit from. And so I really appreciate the messaging of what they do because I think it ultimately can lead to a better way of living for everyone.

Latoya Johnson (20:42)

Was there a particular aspect of the book that was harder to write for you?

Bradley Morgan (20:48)

Well, when we're coming up to the later years, especially within the last 10, 15 years, you know, that, that was a little bit more challenging because, you know, with the 80s, they released like five albums over the course of seven years. But since like the last 15, 20 years, they haven't released as many albums. And so there was in writing that there was a lot of discussion about that process and that kind of second guessing themselves and wanting to get things the way they wanted to get them. And this resulted in a lot of comments to the press like, oh, we've got this album coming out and that's not actually true. Or we've got all these songs and we're just narrowing them down. And then a year later you hear the exact same thing. And so that became challenging to, to write about as compared to the earlier chapters. But I just had to find a different angle with it. And so with that, with those later years, it became about writing about a band that was grappling with, with their own scale. You know, this was no longer the, the band that was playing, you know, the Dublin clubs or you know, you know, touring the clubs in, in the US before they broke to the arenas and stadiums. Now they were Rock and Roll hall of Famers. They, at that time they had the highest grossing tour of all time. This was a band that was struggling. How do they maintain their, their ethos of being intimate and, and drawing this connection with the audience, but. But do so at a much larger scale. And so I was very careful about how I conveyed that narrative and it kind of helped me get through these parts of their career where we don't know exactly what they're doing. But there's just a lot of comments about what's potentially happening and kind of sifting through that. So it's a band grappling with their own legacy, looking back and the scale of who they were now compared to when they started out.

Latoya Johnson (22:44)

And it's very interesting. There was a part, there was a lot of underlining in the book that I did, but there was a mention by producer Steve Lillywhite where he says the band totally operates in chaos when they're in the studio. They work slowly, get frustrated, then hold these epic meetings to bemoan how slowly they're working and how frustrated they are. And so it's interesting. We know U2, I know they've been a band my entire life, but I never knew how they worked in the studio. And so I feel like the book gives a deep dive in how these four individuals create this. This body of work that has, has been like foundational in pop culture.

Bradley Morgan (23:36)

In.

Latoya Johnson (23:37)

Writing about things like this and writing about the nooks and crannies of how they create this work. Has it changed the way you listen to their music?

Bradley Morgan (23:48)

It certainly does because. So what's been rather consistent throughout their career and how they approach making music is that they're really big into improvisation. They don't really come in with a lot of strong ideas. They come in, they start jamming together, pick out what works and then build a framework from there. You know, as I mentioned, one came out of a like an 18 minute long jam session. They took a bridge and then like another bridge and kind of piece it together in their younger years when they were trying to get a record contract and put out that first album and really build momentum as this up and coming band, you know, they're. They're making music a lot faster. You know, from Boy to October, they're in the studio trying to make it work and there's a sense of urgency that, you know, is, is of, you know, major resource for the young. But as you get older and you have a lot more experiences and different frames of references and other life changes that your process kind of, you know, it changes. There's still improvisational, but how much time they spend on material is. Is what is, is what's different. They have, you know, more time and money to dedicate to these, to these, to recording this material. And also they've had instances in their, in their history that's informed that process as well. You know, certainly making their 1997 album pop was a difficult period because they had committed themselves to a tour but hadn't even finished the album yet. And they, because they had, they thought, well, we should be done with this album. They weren't. They released pop to be a little less than they wanted it to be. You know, they since kind of remixed a few songs to be reflect more of what they wanted. But I think experiences like that, where they felt rushed and they weren't satisfied with the results has really informed their process where, okay, we have the time, we have the money, we have the resources that we didn't have several decades earlier. Let's really put in the, you know, our hours to make something that we're proud of and speaks to where we're at and what we want to do at this time.

Latoya Johnson (25:57)

Was there any information that you didn't know with the Joshua Tree that you discovered in this project that you were like, oh my gosh, how fabulous is that? I did not know that this piece of information about this band that I've been writing about.

Bradley Morgan (26:13)

Oh, I gotta think about that for a second. About the Joshua Tree part.

Latoya Johnson (26:17)

Yes, because I, of course going through the book, there's a lot that I didn't know. And there was one particular thing that I'll talk about in a second. But as I was going through, I was like, I wonder if there was something that Bradley didn't know and discovered about them and was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And maybe contributed to how you feel about them now.

Bradley Morgan (26:36)

I don't think there was a particular piece of information that was new to me exactly, because I, I, that was really well trodden area for my first book. But you know, I had to. I was only particularly focused on one particular part of their career for that first book. And so I think juxtaposing it with other aspects of their career and the rest of their history helped, you know, kind of helped me appreciate different aspects and qualities of what they were doing. You know, certainly going from the Unforgettable Fire to making the Joshua Tree, that's not a journey that I cover in the first book. I mean, but I talk about the making of the Joshua Tree and how it was recorded. But when they were making that jump from War to Unforgettable Fire, going from this harder post Punk sound to this more Brian Eno inspired, you know, kind of sonic landscape. It really got me to appreciate the journey to making the Joshua Tree more than I did when I wrote the first book.

Latoya Johnson (27:41)

So. So going back to, to what came to me as I read the first chapter, it occurred to me, and I chuckle at myself as I'm about to say this, that I didn't know Bono and the Edge's real names. I did not know their given names at birth. And so when you refer to Bono as Paul in the first chapter, I kept saying who is Paul? Why, who is. Who is Bradley referring to? Who's Paul? And it just occurred to me that that's how they are cemented in the pop culture zeitgeist. For me specifically, that I only know them as a rock band. I only know them as their stage names. I don't, don't know much about their personal lives. Never did. I know Bono's activism, the band's humanitarianism, and I know their music. And I think that. And I feel like it's probably more of an older old school perception to have, but there was a point in time where we didn't know everything about celebrities, that we didn't have social media and we didn't have these avenues of learning, like so much about the intricacy of their lives. We just really knew what they gave us and that was their music. And so that was really what I took away from reading until the end of the world. But what was your intention in publishing the book that you wanted readers to take away from it?

Bradley Morgan (29:15)

Well, I wanted them to understand the full journey of the entire band, you know, not just from them as a band and the music that they made, but where they came from, because it imprints on them so much. You know, you mentioned, you know, Paul or. And so it's Paul Hewson and David Evans who would become Bono and the Edge. And, you know, I'm sure when they go back to Ireland, there are certain people who still refer them as Paul and David who are just like, you know, what? We're not going to acknowledge, you know, how big you boys have become. You're still Paul to us and you're still David to us. But, you know, this was a, you know, something I wish I could have fleshed out a little bit more with the book, but maybe this wouldn't be the right book for it. And, you know, certainly there's a word count with these type of books, but, you know, the, the environment that they grew up in, in, in Ireland, in the 70s was, was, could be rather difficult. You know, Ireland at that time was the poorest country in Western Europe. And there was a lot of modernization, urbanization that was happening that was really having an impact on their communities. And you also have the political troubles, the, the troubles themselves, you know, the, the sectarian violence that was happening largely in, in Northern Ireland. And where these names come from for them is that, you know, these were young men who needed some kind of direction. And, you know, there's a lot of paths that young white men can take, especially from, you know, poor socioeconomic backgrounds that can often lead to danger and violence and, you know, criminal activity. And that's, that can't be understated. But with them, they, they found a different path. They, they found their, they found friends who, you know, had the same kind of ideas and feelings as them, and they formed their own little gang. They formed their own little kind of collective called Lipton Village, which was their kind of performance street art gang. And they would do little bits or things around town, you know, as opposed to, you know, joining the IRA or anything like that. But that's where their names came from. The, David Evans got the name the Edge because of the shape of his head. And Bono went through so many different names. I list them all in the book, but it was like Bono Vaux of o' Connell Street. Bono Vox. His name is inspired by a hearing aid store that's in Dublin that I think, like loosely translates in Latin to like good voice or something like that. It's a little bit of a mistranslation. So, yeah, there's one word as like one of his names, which is this incredibly unpronounceable name, but it eventually came down to Bono Vox and then eventually just Bono.

Latoya Johnson (31:56)

I, I usually don't, now, I usually don't ask authors about what they're working on next because writing books is incredibly time intensive and emotionally intensive. And so I don't usually like to ask, but we've gotten three books from you in like four or five years. So I'm just interested if there's any other ideas you have percolating right now. Anything like that we can expect in the next year or two, since that seems to be your, how you write your books.

Bradley Morgan (32:30)

You know, I, I, I don't know when I wrote my first one because, you know, it was funny writing the first one because I wasn't a writer before then I wrote one article for a community, community radio station blog that I volunteer with, but I just had this idea for this book And I'm glad that came to happen. And I was, I was never sure if, if I had another one in me. And then this led to, you know, the Zappa one And now this YouTube one, the U2 one really came out of an opportunity that was provided to me. I had to go out and kind of seek it a little bit, but it didn't have the same journey that my first two books went on. So I'm not sure what's next. I mean, getting two books out in the same year is certainly difficult. And I want to be open to whatever opportunities may come my way. I know it's getting harder for authors and writers with the shuttering of, you know, various outlets and the consolidation of our media is creating fewer and fewer opportunities. So I, I, I, I'm not sure exactly. I want to be open to things, certainly I want to, I want to get into 33 to third because that's, you know, that's a club that I'm like, okay. And I think I, you know, that I want to do something for that. I did pitch something. Wasn't accepted. I'll re pitch it again. But as far as, like, kind of the beginnings of future ideas, you know, I'm thinking Bowie. I'm thinking something with bowie in the 90s and, and a commentary about techno fascism. And I'm not sure what that will become. I mean, I wasn't even sure if my, if my Zappa book could be a book. I originally had written an article for Pop Matters on that, and that became kind of my foundation. Like, okay, I think I have a book here, so maybe I need to go through that same exercise of just trying to get an article in and testing the waters of. Okay, can this be expanded to a much larger project?

Latoya Johnson (34:29)

Well, Bradley Morgan's U2 until the end of the World, it is out now. It is not only is it a visually stunning book, the information is also well written and great. Bradley. I cannot wait till the next project drops. And thank you so much for being here with me today.

Bradley Morgan (34:47)

Thank you so much for having me.

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