The Joshua Tree, twenty years old this March, is one of the most ambitious albums ever released by one of the most frankly ambitious bands ever to grace the of Time magazine; an album stuffed to rafters with anthems that nakedly aimed to change the world, to run, hide, and tear down the walls that hold us all inside. It is a fantastically good album, a success even judged by its own excessively bright lights. But for all its globe-bestriding hooey and pyrotechnics, The Joshua Tree’s success (as an album, as opposed to the collections of ring-tone-ready anthems U2 put out as greatest hits compilations and has used as templates for all subsequent albums) depends entirely on its still center.
Closing the A-side of the album, on the heels of the impossibly ostentatious, long-winded display of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” “With or Without You” and “Bullet the Blue Sky” (just the titles are exhausting) “Running to Stand Still” occupies a landscape so sparse, it sounds like it belongs on a different album altogether. U2’s greatest strength, never better captured than in Joshua Tree’s opening quartet, is their faith in music as a transcendent powertool of justice, faith, and redemption. Yet “Running to Stand Still” is a song riven with regrets, a song of failed flight and the closed circle of compromise.
It is Bono’s first, and possibly last, song as an adult, its durability predicated on its exceptional modesty. Opening with a yawning, aching acoustic slide, “Running to Stand Still” pointedly swears off the incantatory guitar bombast the Edge had just tuned to perfection. The simple chords push towards a lilted waltz’ reel but, tripped up by the demands of rock 4/4, settle into a subdued halfway measure, a sunken-spirited calypso that begins each bar where it started, triplet-triplet-duplet in perpetuity.
The Edge’s claim to greatness is based partly on his stoic restraint; on “Running to Stand Still” he is so restrained he barely plays guitar at all, just feather-struck harmonics (Eno produced, after all) echoing the intake of Bono’s lover’s breath. Because, like every U2 song, “Running” is a love song, rife with longing from the minute Bono’s character begins to stir: Said I, I gotta do something Granted, the lyrics suffer from Bono’s inescapable vagueness, but there is a specificity in the non-descript surroundings: “where she was” is both universal, and descriptive of a place that is, physically as much as emotionally, marked by nothing more than a passing, pale presence, weightlessly seeking refuge through momentum, which sweeps into hearing in the guise of Larry Mullen’s hammered tympani and Adam Clayton’s bass ostinato. Since their first singles, U2 have sunk or soared on the strength of their rhythm section; “Running to Stand Still”’s orchestral swells and troughs showcase a greater sensitivity and sensuality than Clayton/Mullen are permitted when throwing down blacktop for Edge’s skidding, spinning licks.
It is the rhythm section that conveys the hopeless motion of the steam train, a temporary refuge from the storm that inescapably returns to the point of departure, to where she was. But I only see one way out.
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