The desert is the leit moti of the whole album. Ultimately, this is an epic album that reflects the enduring, resilient nature of the Joshua Tree itself.įIVE KEYS TO THE POWER OF THE JOSHUA TREE Despite their more rational and structured essence, however, these tracks retain a magical, poetic quality. During the band’s early years, their songs were primitive and spontaneously written. The Edge’s delayed effect defines one of U2’s trademarks and Bono’s vocals are experimental like never before. Compared to their first four records, the tracks here present a far wider variation of tone and nuance. The Joshua Tree varies from hard-hitting rock (‘Bullet the Blue Sky’) to acoustic blues (‘Running to Stand Still’). There are no filters: instead a powerful simplicity – a volcanic dynamism of sorts – that is rich in imagery and colour, rule.

Intimacy and expressive power go hand in hand, where the wide-open spaces of America meet the closest matters of the heart. No other U2 album is as politically and spiritually dense as The Joshua Tree. Thus, as the album unfolds, the void of the desert is invested with a mixture of spiritual relief and cinematic power. Its branches are a cry for hope, reaching out like a form of prayer. This tree can survive very harsh conditions. The physical desolation of the desert is also related to the desert of the soul and the desert of ‘our love’, which finds its restoration in the spiritual triumph of a small solitary tree, itself apparently lost in the vastness of a hostile territory. Throughout The Joshua Tree, we are confronted with the desolation of a deserted, immense, timeless landscape and with a nation of progress and oppressors, in a place where dreams and violence co-exist. In Ignatian terms, it celebrates, at once, Desolation and Consolation. The essence of the album is shaped around the band’s musical exploration of American and Irish folk roots. The gap between the ideal of the so-called Promised Land and the real America is one of the driving forces behind the most critically acclaimed of U2 albums, The Joshua Tree. “Be strong and of good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land which I sware unto their Fathers to give them” (Joshua, 1:6, KJV).

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