Where the Streets Have No Name

Most rock songs announce themselves with a voice. This one announces itself with a shimmer. A single guitar figure arrives out of near silence, each note echoing a split second later, and for nearly two minutes nothing else is needed. By the time the drums and vocals enter, the listener has already been somewhere. That sense of arrival, of being carried toward a place before you know what it is, is the real subject of U2's opening track on The Joshua Tree.

The song is about a place that does not exist yet, or perhaps has never existed, where a person's address tells nobody anything about who they are. It is also, famously, a song that almost destroyed the people making it.

The long road to the studio

The Edge assembled the first demo on a four-track at his newly bought home, Melbeach House, working through keyboards, bass, guitar and a drum machine the night before the band resumed sessions for the album.^[1] The band loved the idea, but turning it into a performance was another matter. Bassist Adam Clayton has said the arrangement initially sounded like a foreign language, and producer Daniel Lanois ended up walking the group through the chord changes at a blackboard.^[1] The structure shifts between time signatures, with the intro and outro in 3/4 and the body of the song in 4/4, which Lanois described as a tongue-twister for the rhythm section.^[1][2]

Brian Eno, the other half of the production team, reckoned that something like half of the album's sessions went into this single track.^[1] Frustrated, he proposed erasing the tapes and staging an accident, so that the band could start over without the weight of every failed attempt. According to the account on Wikipedia, engineer Pat McCarthy stopped him.^[1] The final recording was assembled from several takes, and it carries none of that struggle on its surface. What it carries instead is a feeling of enormous, controlled lift.

That lift is largely mechanical, and beautifully so. The Edge's opening arpeggio is processed with a dotted-eighth delay, so every note sounds twice, creating a cascading, rhythmic shimmer that seems to be more than one guitar.^[1] The bass and drums do not arrive until a little past the one-minute mark, and the vocals wait almost two minutes.^[1] It is a slow-motion sunrise of an arrangement, and the patience is part of the meaning.

Two places in one song

The lyrics were sparked by two very different landscapes. The first is Belfast. Bono has explained that he was struck by the idea that, in that city, you could guess a person's religion and income just from the street they lived on, with the houses getting pricier the further up the hill you went.^[1][3] In a divided city, a street name is a kind of passport, announcing tribe and class before anyone speaks.

The second landscape is Ethiopia. After Live Aid, Bono and his wife Ali Hewson travelled there on a humanitarian trip, and he later said he scribbled early lyrics on airline sick bags and scraps of paper in a tent in a village called Ajibar.^[2] Accounts differ on where exactly the writing began, but the contrast is the point. In a famine camp, the markers of status and sectarian identity that obsess a place like Belfast simply fall away, replaced by something more elemental.

Put together, the two settings give the song its engine. One is a world sorted and labelled by street, the other a world stripped down to survival and, strangely, to a kind of spiritual clarity. The song reaches for a third place that borrows from both, somewhere you could go without being sorted first.

A sketch of a feeling

Bono has been refreshingly modest about what he actually wrote. In a 1987 interview he described the lyric as an attempt to sketch a location, maybe a spiritual one, maybe a romantic one, but above all a feeling.^[3] Decades later, in 2017, he said the words were only a sketch and admitted he regretted one of the rhymes, though the Edge disagreed and said he loved the track as it stands.^[1][3] Eno, for his part, argued that the open-endedness is a virtue, because it leaves room for listeners to finish the picture themselves.^[1]

That openness is why the song works on so many levels. The narrator speaks of a desire to leave a place, to be carried away from walls, dust and the weight of the world's expectations, and of a willingness to take the journey even when it costs something. The imagery is of movement and release rather than argument. Nothing in the verses lectures. Instead, they give you the sensation of someone who has decided that the only honest response to a divided, claustrophobic world is to head for the horizon.

Bono has linked this to his own feeling of claustrophobia in cities, and a longing to escape places where society's values press down on people.^[2] It is a very Irish kind of restlessness, a young band from a small, tense island looking for wide-open space, and it fits the album's larger fascination with the American desert. The Joshua Tree was recorded largely in Irish houses rather than conventional studios, yet it keeps imagining a vast, empty landscape where a person could start again.

Faith without a label

There is a religious current running under the track, even though it never names a doctrine. Bono has said that in the desert we meet God, and the whole song has the shape of a pilgrimage.^[2] It is no accident that the Belfast inspiration concerns religious identity. The tragedy of sectarianism is that faith becomes a badge and a boundary. The song imagines the opposite, a faith that is a destination people travel toward together, with no one checking which street they came from.

This is also why the music matters as much as the words. The long, patient build works like a hymn without a congregation, a gradual gathering of voices and instruments toward a shared peak. When the band finally locks in, the effect is communal. Bono has described how, even at the worst concert imaginable, the moment the band launches into this song everything changes, as if God suddenly walks through the room.^[4] That is a striking claim from a band that has spent decades wrestling with belief, and it suggests that the song does its spiritual work through sound as much as through language.

The rooftop and the stadium

The song's live life has become part of its meaning. For the music video, director Meiert Avis staged a performance on the roof of a liquor store at 7th and Main in downtown Los Angeles on March 27, 1987, an obvious nod to the Beatles' rooftop concert in Let It Be.^[1] A crowd of more than a thousand gathered, and the police shutdown seen in the video reportedly happened during filming.^[1] The band played the song several times to give the director enough coverage, and the finished clip, which exists in a longer and a shorter edit, went on to win the Grammy for Best Performance Music Video.^[1][5]

The track debuted live on April 2, 1987, in Tempe, Arizona, and has appeared at nearly every headline U2 show since, with more than 900 performances logged by 2017.^[1] Its meanings have shifted with the settings. On the Zoo TV Tour it was bathed in red video-screen glare. At the Super Bowl XXXVI halftime show in February 2002, only months after the September 11 attacks, the names of the victims were projected behind the band while they played it.^[1] A song about a place without labels became, for a few minutes, a song about grief shared by a whole nation.

Reception and legacy

The song was released as the third single from The Joshua Tree on August 31, 1987, reaching number four in the UK and number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100, and topping the charts in Ireland and New Zealand.^[1] Critics have been kind to it ever since. AllMusic's Steve Huey called it the perfect album opener, and it has turned up near the top of lists of the greatest guitar songs and of the band's best work.^[1]

As an opener, it sets the terms for everything that follows. The album moves from the soaring hope of its first track through the ache of a love song, the anger of a protest, and the quiet devastation of its closing songs. All of it feels more affecting because it starts with an image of freedom. The first thing you hear is an open horizon, and the rest of the record measures how far reality falls short of it.

Other ways to hear it

Not everyone hears pure hope. Some commentators read the song as more frustrated than triumphant, a lament for how far the real world is from the place it describes.^[3] On this reading, the title is a wistful impossibility. We do live on named streets, in named neighborhoods, with all the baggage that comes with them, and the song's glory is partly the glory of a thing we cannot have.

Another reading takes the song as personal rather than political. Strip away Belfast and Ethiopia, and what remains is a plain desire to be known for who you are, not for where you come from. The Edge's guitar, endlessly looping and ascending, can be heard as the sound of that wish refusing to settle.

Bono has also hinted at a more modest, even romantic reading, since a location can be romantic as easily as spiritual.^[3] A place where no one knows your street is a place where two people can simply meet. The song holds all these ideas in suspension, which may be why it has outlasted every attempt to pin it to a single message.

Why it still lifts

Part of the song's endurance is that it makes its argument without arguing. It does not tell the listener that sectarian division is wrong or that poverty is unjust. It simply builds a sonic space in which those things do not apply, and invites you to stand in it for five minutes. That is a more generous kind of protest than most, and a more durable one.

The other part is the story of its making. A song that nearly got wiped from the tapes, that drove its producers to despair and its band to exhaustion, ended up sounding effortless. There is something fitting in that. The place the song describes is hard to reach, and the journey there is long, but when the guitar begins to shimmer and the rhythm section finally steps in, it feels, for a moment, as though you have arrived.