Thursday May 29, 2008
In a recent interview Bono had this to say about songs and their power…
This is what people don’t understand. There are such strong attachments to the songs that we have nothing to do with,” he says. “I went to see Bruce Springsteen, and he played ‘Promised Land.’ I was screaming! I was grateful to Bruce, but what was going on was what was in my life when I heard that song first. That’s the humbling bit that performers don’t want to admit to; they’re only a small part of what’s really going on.
We’re only a small part of making a song resonate with people… really what people grab onto about a song is how it fits in with what’s happening in their life at the time.
I’ve experienced this with one of my own songs. It was a song that our church really took hold of, in fact people’s response to it was so surprising to me. In retrospect I can look back and understand that it wasn’t that it was a particularly great song but that it was a timely song. For lots of people in church at that time it was an echo of what was happening in their life and so when they sang the song it became much more than a song, it was actually them vocalising some part of their life.
So its a good reminder for us songwriters that no matter how good we think our songs are that they are still just a small part of the bigger picture of worship.
