And in the world
A heart of darkness
A fire zone
Where poets speak their heart
Then bleed for it
— U2, One Tree Hill

In one of those time warp moments, I realized that U2’s Joshua Tree was released 38 years ago yesterday. That resonates deeply when you’re of a certain age. We all have our cornerstones of influence. We all have our soundtrack of life, anchored in moments that are forever brought back by the song playing in the background, bringing it all back to us once again. For me, U2 has been the anchor, laying down milestone moments for much of my life.

The first song I heard from Joshua Tree was With or Without You, played as a single on WBCN, one of Boston’s great radio stations back in the day. They played it late in the afternoon, after a team workout, and I sat in my pickup truck in front of my apartment to hear it that first time. Music is like Kurt Vonnegut’s amber of the moment: It’s a powerful resin that holds memory to place and time. This is who we once were. This is still a part of us, even after so much has changed since that first spark of awareness of what we were hearing.

Many might say that U2 peaked in their Super Bowl performance in February 2002, when the world was still reeling from 9/11 and seeing the names of the victims of that day scroll upwards while the band performed MLK (from The Unforgettable Fire) and one of the big songs from Joshua Tree, Where the Streets Have No Name. That performance forever transformed the latter song in my mind from an overplayed song of the late 80’s to a spiritual anchor in a storm of emotions leading up to that evening. I don’t believe one performance represented a peak for a band as big as U2, I believe they sustained excellence for three decades and we can debate which albums were their best from the bar set by Joshua Tree.

The music industry has forever changed, and albums as a work of art are not what they once were for popular music. The music industry can pound sand. Music is more than a hit song, it’s a part of our identity. Like a great novel, a great album has the power to transform lives. U2 has their fair share of great albums, and they’ve carried the torch for rock music from vinyl to streaming as well as any band. In a culture that digests information in sound bites, the concept of an album is perhaps a bridge too far. But a great album still has a place in this world.

For all the hits on Joshua Tree, One Tree Hill is the song I most associate with that moment in the late 1980’s when U2 ruled the airwaves. It’s a deep cut and one of the last songs on the album. One has to be invested in the listening experience to reach it. And there’s the value of a great album: finding the hidden gems amongst the hits.

One Tree Hill whispers seductively across time. And like time itself, we are all running like a river, running to the sea. We didn’t know what that meant back then, until time flew by, until that tight circle of people we once clung to ran from our lives and others flowed in to replace them. Until time ran out for some people who meant a great deal to us, people who had their final run to the sea. We’re closer now ourselves, aren’t we? Yet still we run. So by all means, turn up the music and enjoy it once again.