Breaking Waves…new portrait, Halsey tour, fan club gifts and more…

Original Story by Aaron J. Sams (2025-06-14)

Artist Colin Davidson from Northern Ireland has shared his 2021 portrait of Bono. The artwork will be on display at the National Gallery of Ireland starting on June 17, 2025.

Davidson shares, “In 2021, I was invited to Bono’s house to make some portraits of him at 60 years old. The sittings were informal and intensely personal engagements, encompassing periods of drawing, reading from Bono’s (then forthcoming) autobiography, and reflections on family, music, art and life. And moments of silence. These are the aspects which hopefully weave their way into the fabric of the paint. Thank you Bono for the privilege.

You just never know where Bono is going to hop up. Yes, we said hop.

Halsey is currently on tour in the US, and the whole production has an Alice in Wonderland story woven throughout. Video interludes between songs follow Halsey as Alice. In the introduction she falls into the rabbit hole, and the first song is accompanied by video of her falling. The tour is called “For My Last Trick”. The tour started May 10 and runs until July 6 in North America.

What does this have to do with U2? Well Bono is the voice of the rabbit. “There you are! Finally!” If you’ve ever wanted to hear Bono doing lines from Alice in Wonderland this is the show for you.

Bono is heard speaking in the first four interludes in the show.

Bono and Halsey have known each other for a while. In 2016 the two performed “What a Year This Has Been!” on Jimmy Kimmel, Live!. Bono and Halsey also worked together while recording Sing 2. In that film they both provide voices to characters.

Asked by Variety how Bono voicing the rabbit, Halsey shared “I’ve known Bono for a long time and, honestly, just asked him. He’s just such a cool guy and always just down to do fun and interesting things, so I couldn’t picture anybody else, really.”

Halsey shared that Bono may not voice the rabbit every night, and others have recorded the parts, “But I really wanted to start with Bono just because I wanted a really mythical voice. The cheek that he adds to it also is so special, because there’s a knowingness; when I got his takes back, you could just hear that he deeply understood the metaphor. I have a great take of him, actually, where you can hear my line where I go ‘Ever since I fell down that fucking rabbit hole’ and you can hear him cracking up in the background, because without me even having to say it, he knows I’m talking about the industry…Also, he’s just like a wizard, isn’t he? He’s just so believable as a magical entity.”

At the end of the show “Bono is the rabbit” appears in the credits in between band introductions and introducing Halsey herself.

There’s been a lot of interest in the new gift available with subscription to U2.com. The 2025 gift, a black hoodie, with a “Love and Peace or Else” design on the front and various logos on the back was announced recently as the 2025 gift.

Seeing a lot of questions about this, and will share that the first place you should seek help for any U2.Com subscription questions including subscription gifts is at https://www.u2.com/help.

The offer of the hoodie went live on February 15, 2025. So if you resubscribed before that time, the option to pick anything other than a lyric book did not exist. If that is the case, you won’t see the hoodie size choices in your profile.

If you did resubscribe after February 15, and chose the “to be announced gift” or the more recent “hoodie” offer, then you should see a size selection option in your U2.com profile. You can find your profile only after you have logged in. Find your profile after logging in by clicking the little down arrow next to your name in the top right hand corner. From there choose account info. The option to pick the sizes is available under “Gift Status” on the left of the screen.

When will the 2025 gift ship? An email to lapsed subscribers shares, “As we’re a little later than usual in announcing this 2025 special gift, we plan to turn delivery around quickly.” The delayed 2024 gifts are still shipping out currently, with copies now starting to arrive in the US and Canada, and other locations. So perhaps we’ll see the 2025 gifts arrive soon after.

Bono’s EP “Stories of Surrender” came out last month in the UK, and should have started to ship in other countries on Friday. The EP features three songs from the film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “Desire” and “The Showman”, recorded with the Jacknife Lee Ensemble. It’s also had a bit of chart success in the UK. Bono scored a #1 in both the physical sales chart, and the vinyl singles chart in the UK charts, and came in at #7 in the official singles sales chart (which is a mix of physical and digital sales.) We have been updating our discography entry for the EP as more information comes in, and you can find the chart information and other notes here.

We’re always working on U2Songs in the background. Improving things, and adding new content. A few of those things have made their debut over the last month or so.

We’ve finally launched a section of the site to capture radio shows. There’s a lot of pre-recorded shows sent to radio, which feature the band over the years. Many of those include unique live content. We’ve introduced a new section of the site to track some of these releases. We’ve started with live content. You can browse by format, by date, or by title. Over the next few months we will continue to expand this area of the site.

Many radio stations receive content as part of a regular series of promotional releases. Sometimes these are subscription based services like Promo Only, and other times they are series that are put together by the record label. And as a series it made little sense to include a separate release for each recording U2 feature on. These offerings sometimes include unique content, and we’ve introduced a section to track this material as well, and spotlight where U2 has had releases in this type of release in the past. We’ve got some basics in place which you can browse now. Over the next few months we will be adding a number of other series.

U2 are currently uploading a number of lyric videos to YouTube, as well as making them available on other streaming services. As we usually do with such projects, we’re tracking the items as they get uploaded, and have created the page above to keep track. So far, all of the songs have been chapter titles in Surrender, Bono’s book, with the exception of “40” which comes in at the end of that book regardless.

We track all of U2’s demos. Tracks that we’ve heard about that may or may not have been released over the years. We recently sat down and put together the list for the current album in development. A few titles have now been mentioned. The link above takes you direct to the 2020 section, but feel free to browse for earlier years as well.

< Next News Entry | Previous News Entry >

u2songs.com was formerly known as u2wanderer.org. Follow us on Twitter | Facebook