Spoilers: Bono’s Surrender Chapter Titles

Original Stories by Aaron J. Sams (2022-10-19)

We’ve been teasing the songs that will make up Songs of Surrender for a few weeks now. On Sunday, Bono announced the album by name and said it was coming soon. But coming out first is Bono’s autobiography Surrender. We can share the structure of the book now. The book will be out in full on November 1 in most countries, just under two weeks. For more on the availability of the book and foreign versions of the book, please visit our Book entry here.

Please look away now if you do not wish to have spoilers about the book contents. We do have a Spotify playlist up if you wish to listen along to the original versions of these songs as you read through the article. We can confirm that some retailers have started to ship the book already, and this information is taken from a purchased copy of the book, and not from any advanced release of the book. If you are trying to avoid spoilers, that information will be harder to avoid going forward now that some retailers have started shipping the books.

  • SPOILER BREAK *

The book is split into three sections. Each section will have a number of chapters. And each chapter is named after a previously released U2 song.

Part One includes:

1. Lights of Home
2. Out of Control
3. Iris (Hold Me Close)
4. Cedarwood Road
5. Stories for Boys
6. Song for Someone
7. I Will Follow
8. 11 O’Clock Tick Tock
9. Invisible
10. October
11. Two Hearts Beat as One
12. Sunday Bloody Sunday
13. Bad
14. Bullet the Blue Sky
15. Where the Streets Have No Name
16. With or Without You
17. Desire

Part Two includes:

18. Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses
19. Until the End of the World
20. One
21. The Fly
22. Even Better Than the Real Thing
23. Mysterious Ways
24. Stuck in a Moment
25. Wake Up Dead Man
26. The Showman
27. Pride (In the Name of Love)

Part Three includes:

28. Beautiful Day
29. Crumbs from Your Table
30. Miracle Drug
31. Vertigo
32. Ordinary Love
33. City of Blinding Lights
34. Get Out of Your Own Way
35. Every Breaking Wave
36. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For
37. Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way
38. Moment of Surrender
39. Landlady
40. Breathe

At the end of the book is a section of “after words”. That is followed by “after the after words” which includes thank you notes, credits, song publishing information, and also confirms that U2 have reimagined 40 U2 tracks during the lockdown, and calls the collection Songs of Surrender.

The songs listed above are song titles of each chapter. Other songs are mentioned throughout the text mixed in among these chapters. Bono works in lyrics from the songs as well as mentioning the songs themselves. Each chapter is also accompanied by a drawing done by Bono himself.

Chapter titles have been taken from from U2’s earliest album Boy right up to 2018’s Songs of Experience. There are a total of 11 songs from the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience era including two non-album tracks, “Invisible” and “Ordinary Love”. (27.5%) Every studio album except for Zooropa is represented.

From the 1980s there will be titles from Boy, one from October, two songs from War, two songs from The Unforgettable Fire, four songs from The Joshua Tree and one from Rattle and Hum as well as the non-album track, “11 O’Clock Tick Tock”. There are 14 songs in total from the 1980s. (35%) From the 1990s, there are six songs from Achtung Baby and one song from Pop for a total of seven songs from the 1990s. (17.5%) From the 2000s, there will be two songs from All That You Can’t Leave Behind, four songs from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and two songs from No Line on the Horizon.(20%)

The book opens with a chapter titled “Lights of Home” and the book opens with the first line from that song, “I shouldn’t be here, ‘cause I should be dead”.

The Songs of Surrender album which Bono mentioned was coming soon on Sunday night is expected to include new recordings of these 40 songs. In the book it is confirmed that these new versions were recorded during Covid lock downs with the full band participating. Bono also revealed that The Edge would be on (one of) the covers for the record, choosing an image of himself with his bald head showing to be used as the cover art.

Many thanks to Agus for his assistance with this article and the playlist on Spotify!

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