All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000)

The other day I was shopping in one of my local hypermarket superstores, filling my basket with the usual weird motley of groceries, linens, hardware, and clothes, when I noticed familiar music playing. Why, my goodness, it was a song from the very album I was preparing to write about—"Beautiful Day," from U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind. This led me to look it up and realize that the song had been a #21 hit at the end of 2000, which led me to further marvel over the band's surprisingly substantial entry in my circa 2009 Billboard book: 16 hits to that point, six top 10s, two #1s. I knew they had become crass sellouts to every audience they ever had, except maybe Jann Wenner, but I hadn't realized how far it went. I had been mulling over a defense of All That You Can't Leave Behind because over the years it has shaped up as my answer to the party question, What is your favorite U2 album after all? But now in this citadel of consumerism, fortified later by those refreshed chart statistics of the past, it sounded so disconcertingly apt that it all started to collapse in front of me. Clearly the song belongs more now to the layered shared memories of the Billboard hit parade over the decades, and at 18 years old this year it's just old enough to feel a little instantly stale. In fact, I admit that was my reaction when I played the album for the first time in years a few weeks ago. I kind of flinched at it a little. By the third time through, a few days later, all the elements of warmth reassembled and I found myself looking forward again to hearing it regularly. Is it a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? "Beautiful Day" was not just the only (relatively modest) hit but it also opens the album, a kind of corollary to the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" to start side 2 of Revolver. Very sweet, in other words, just this side of saccharine, but an effective mood-setter for a nice batch of anthems. In the case of U2 it is some kind of moral sugar rush—the song titles tell a story too, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "Elevation," "Peace on Earth," "When I Look at the World," finishing on "Grace"—but once it's familiar it gets to be comforting. I did love this album in its time, taking it as the band's welcome (if meditated) retreat from nearly 10 years of incessant "pop" posturing and return to a certain soulfulness they always had that appealed to me (in retrospect, more and more, I have to ask myself what was my problem again with The Joshua Tree? ... for another time). All That You Can't Leave Behind also later became one of the side anthems of 9/11, as the song "New York" was so poignant in the historical moment and brought the album back for me for another fall and winter. And now this fall and winter, at home, in my car if I want to use the CD player, and even in what passes for shopping malls these days. God bless us every one for all that we can't leave behind.