The Unforgettable Fire - Composition

Composition

A far more atmospheric album than the previous War, The Unforgettable Fire was at the time was the band's most dramatic change in direction. It has a rich and orchestrated sound and was the first U2 album with a cohesive sound. Under Lanois' direction, Larry's drumming became looser, funkier and more subtle, and Adam's bass became more subliminal, such that the rhythm section no longer intruded, but flowed in support of the songs.

The opening track, "A Sort of Homecoming" immediately shows the change in U2's sound. Like much of the album, the hard-hitting martial drum sound of War is replaced with a subtler polyrhythmic shuffle, and the guitar is no longer as prominent in the mix. Typical of the album, the track "The Unforgettable Fire", with a string arrangement by Noel Kelehan, has a rich, symphonic sound built from ambient guitar and driving rhythm; a lyrical "sketch" that is an "emotional travelogue" with a "heartfelt sense of yearning". The band cite a travelling Japanese art exhibit of the same name as inspiration for both the song and album title. The exhibition, which the band attended in Chicago, commemorated the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima. However, the open-ended lyric, which Bono says "doesn't tell you anything" do not directly reference nuclear warfare. Rather, the lyrics are about travelling to Tokyo.

The album's lyrics are open to many interpretations, which alongside its atmospheric sounds, provides what the band often called a "very visual feel". Bono had recently been immersing himself in fiction, philosophy and poetry, and came to realise that his song writing mission—which up to that point had been a reluctant one on his behalf—was a poetic one. Bono felt songs like "Bad" and "Pride (In the Name of Love)" were best left as incomplete "sketches", and he said that "The Unforgettable Fire was a beautifully out-of-focus record, blurred like an impressionist painting, very unlike a billboard or an advertising slogan."

The melody and the chords to "Pride (In the Name of Love)" originally came out of a 1983 War Tour sound check in Hawaii. The song was originally intended to be about Ronald Reagan's pride in America's military power, but Bono was influenced by Stephen B. Oates's book about Martin Luther King, Jr. titled Let The Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a biography of Malcolm X to ponder the different sides of the civil rights campaigns, the violent and the non-violent. Bono would revise the lyrics to pay tribute to King. "Pride" went through many changes and re-recordings, as captured in a documentary included on the The Unforgettable Fire Collection video. "Pride" is the most conventional song on the album—Tony Fletcher of Jamming! magazine said at the time it was most commercial song U2 had written—and it was chosen as the album's first single.

On "Wire" Bono tried to convey his ambivalence to drugs. It is a fast-paced song built on a light funk drum groove. The song shows the influence of Talking Heads, with whom Eno had worked. Much of the song was improvised by Bono at the microphone.

The ambient instrumental "4th of July" came about almost entirely through a moment of inspiration from Eno. At the end of a studio session, Eno overheard Clayton improvising a simple bass figure and recorded it "ad hoc" as it was being played. The Edge happened to join in, improvising a few guitar ideas over the top of Clayton's bass; neither knew they were being recorded. Eno added some treatments and then transferred the piece straight to two-track master tape — and that was the song finished, with no possibility of further overdubs.

Bono tried to describe the rush and then come down of heroin use in the song "Bad".

"Elvis Presley and America" is an improvisation, based on a slowed-down backing track from "A Sort of Homecoming", that takes the album's emphasis on feeling over clarity to its furthest extreme. Another song, "Indian Summer Sky", was a social commentary on the prison-like atmosphere of city living in a world of natural forces.

The sparse, dreamlike "MLK" was written as an elegy to King.