"Summer of Love" (2017)
Demo Song
Background Information
“Summer of Love” is a song that U2 has developed for the album Songs of Experience.
In February of 2017, the song is mentioned for the first time, in an article published in MOJO Magazine (Issue 281, cover date, April 2017):
Of the songs Bono currently imagines will make the final tracklist, his current favourite is “The Showman,” “It’s like something from Rubber Soul,” he enthuses. “It’s about singers. It’s not me.” To illustrate his point he quotes the song’s lyrics to MOJO: “The showman gives you front row to his heart/The shaman prays that his heartache will chart/Making a spectacle of falling apart/Is the heart of the show.” Other likely inclusions are “The Best Thing About You Is Me” and “The Little Things That Give You Away,” while both “Red Flag Day” and “Summer of Love” reference the refugee crisis in Europe. “Two songs that have a similar theme,” says Bono “about people running for their lives on the same Mediterranean that we’re running through the shallows. “Summer of Love” is achingly beautiful and empty. It could be a big song and it’s tiny. These are real tunes.”
The Edge also discussed the song in conversation with Rolling Stone in September 2017:
There was a lot that went into that, but one of the jumping-off points was a CNN story about the gardener of Aleppo. It’s about this guy who ran a garden in Aleppo that he kept going through the entire war. It was a political statement to the entire world that he kept this garden going. He was this deeply philosophical character and to him it was an act of defiance to grow flowers in the middle of Aleppo. He actually wound up getting killed in an air raid, so it was a very sad ending, but Bono was really inspired by his defiance. When were looking at that song, we decided that should be the focus geographically.
The song “Summer of Love” is expected to appear on the album Songs of Experience.