“My Week of ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for’”

I think I’m closing in on a discourse that would slot the second song on The Joshua Tree as the greatest song of all time. This tabulation would be based purely on the frequency of my exposure to it as of late, although Don McClean’s “American Pie” in the summer time and Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” in the LATE summer months like August and September also vie strongly. 

And I’m not sure if the U2 glut of this week was seasonal but it would make sense, wouldn’t it? The Joshua Tree is slow, deliberate and grand, the way winter is, the way your actions in winter have to be, what with it taking like five minutes to put all your clothes on before you leave the house, and whatnot. And he**, maybe it’s appropriate too because we’ve survived this rash of the elements, yet in a way everything still feels the same. Maybe it’s like this for some people. For me, it’s really not: everything is more of a pain in the a**. But there’s some renewal, too. 

Anyway, to make a long story short, I seem to just hear this song every day — once on the radio on the way to work, again the next day on the radio in the form of an acoustic guitar cover version from some woman, and the day after that IN work. The format I got it within the kitchen where I work was I think Hozier Pandora, or something along those lines, but what’s more, while I was walking INTO work, I encountered “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the Joshua Tree yin to my feature song’s yang, on the general restaurant satellite radio playlist. 

Is there something we connect with semantically in this song? It sort of exists as this final frontier, I suppose, after the band had toured and seen LA, which is kind of like the “end of the continent” and the “end of the world.” Bono had struggled with infidelity, as is noted in “Trip through Your Wires.” Along these lines, though, this is another great song on The Joshua Tree, as are “One Tree Hill”; “Running to Stand Still”; “Bullet the Blue Sky” and others. Yet I seem to hear “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for” an inordinate amount of times, but at least, by and large, we sidestep the Franz Ferdinand/Cream disaster of only ever hearing “Take Me out” and “Sunshine of Your Love,” when in reality those bands have tons of other great songs. Part of what I wanted to accomplish in this post, anyway, is that there is no improving upon Tomas Doncker’s masterful cover of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for,” and that this would seem to be an opportune time to start working it into playlists and satellite radio interfaces. 

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