U2 songs always have a meaning attached to them.Where the streets..is my fav because of the awesome thought behind it and the amazing guitar by The Edge.Read this entry from Wiki to know why..."Where the Streets Have No Name" was conceived prior to one of the Joshua Tree recording sessions by guitarist The Edge.[4] While recording the song as a band, however, they ran into difficulty. The song's frequent chord and time changes caused problems in playing the song correctly; the difficulty was so great that producer Brian Eno attempted to erase the track.[4][5] Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. later said of the song, "It took so long to get that song right, it was difficult for us to make any sense of it. It only became a truly great song through playing live. On the record, musically, it's not half the song it is live."[4] Originally, the third single from The Joshua Tree was meant to be the song "Red Hill Mining Town", but "Where the Streets Have No Name" was released instead.[6]
The song is interpreted in different ways; a common interpretation of the lyrics is that it refers to the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland, where a person's religion is evident by the street they live on. In a 1987 interview, Bono said of the song:
"Where the Streets Have No Name is more like the U2 of old than any of the other songs on the LP, because it’s a sketch - I was just trying to sketch a location, maybe a spiritual location, maybe a romantic location. I was trying to sketch a feeling. I often feel very claustrophobic in a city, a feeling of wanting to break out of that city and a feeling of wanting to go somewhere where the values of the city and the values of our society don’t hold you down. An interesting story that someone told me once is that in Belfast, by what street someone lives on you can tell not only their religion but tell how much money they’re making - literally by which side of the road they live on, because the further up the hill the more expensive the houses become. You can almost tell what the people are earning by the name of the street they live on and what side of that street they live on. That said something to me, and so I started writing about a place where the streets have no name.[6]
He also alluded to this in a 2000 interview, saying in response to the question of what place he was referring to in the song's lyrics, "I'm not sure, really, about that. I used to think it was Belfast, you know, 'cos in Belfast you can tell somebody's religion, you know, from what street they live on. You just have to say where you're born and everybody knows if you're a Catholic or a Protestant and... I think that might have been where "Where The Streets Have No Name" started from as an idea."[7] He said later in the same interview that the song was about "Transcendence, elevation, whatever you want to call it."[7]
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