The History Mix: U2 Songs at 23.

Original Story by Aaron J. Sams (2018-04-07)

The History Mix isn’t just a place to look back on the history of the band for us, we’ve looked back at others connected to the band, and we’ve also looked back on our own history from time to time and sometimes forward. And since today is our 23rd birthday of providing a U2 page on the internet I selfishly am taking a look back at us. Twenty-three days ago today instead of handing in my final computer studies project on disc, I instead uploaded a U2 page to the internet. It was just a basic discography called “Aaron’s U2 Cave” at first, moving on to be a PopMart resource in 1997, and becoming a full blown discography and lyrics collection once PopMart ended.

We had a good year at U2Songs.com this past year. We brought you news of The Joshua Tree and the eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE tour, the release of “Red Hill Mining Town” as a single, and provided you with the release date of the new album months before it was announced. We have a lot of people that help us out and provide us information, and I would like to thank each and every one of them. We ended up at many shows, and met many new faces, and caught up with many old. And we’re looking forward to doing the same again this year on tour. We also launched our new Demos section, tracking the old demo titles the band has spoken about over the years.

But there’s someone I do have to single out and thank. We’ve got a small staff here at U2Songs.Com – there are six of us who work on the site, but you’ll see a seventh name on the list. I’d like to take a minute to thank Mike Long for his years of assistance on the site. Mike, known better to most of you as Slaneman, has been our lyrics guru for a number of years now. Late last year he expressed an interest to retire, and the rest of us will try to keep up to the high standards he set. You can never truly leave Mike, and we’ve kept your logins active if you ever spot a mistake, and we’re keeping your staff profile active as well. Sending you much love from the whole group of us here at U2Songs.com in your retirement.

I couldn’t do this site without the others on the crew providing help, assistance, ideas, and feedback. I look forward to coming home at the end of the work day and spending a couple of hours with it each night. Brad, Carl, Don, George and Harry – Thank you! (And Harry and Carl – happy birthday to you both this week!)

So what’s up next for us?

We’ve started our coverage of the new tour, and we will follow it through like we have other tours. If you want the full tour coverage, I suggest you find us on Facebook and Twitter, where we have started sharing our countdowns to opening night.

George and I have started discussing some major ideas for the Songs section of the site. A whole new way to look at things! Harry and I are working on some fun ideas for the Videos section that should launch soon. We continue to plug away at the Discography and add 20-30 new images into the releases each week – there’s over 6000 images in there now of U2’s releases through the years, all freshly scanned at high resolution for U2Songs.

And the next new section to launch is coming soon – definitely this year. We’ve actually got two that will probably be launched in the next couple of months. One brings over some material that never transitioned from U2Wanderer.Org, and the other is all brand new and one of the bigger projects we’ve ever tackled. And there’s already some housekeeping and improvements going on around the site. We won’t share all of them with you. Some things are just more fun to stumble across on your own.

Twenty-three years. I don’t think I ever envisioned doing this for so long when I started this as a student at Mount Allison. I want to thank you all for reading, commenting, sharing, and just being friends to us at the site. It has been an amazing journey.

And for those interested, we’ve unearthed the first time we used ‘Cosmo’ with the army helmet as our logo. From 1998, before we even started using the ‘Wanderer’ name. Enjoy!

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