Steve Lillywhite, a welcome addition at the mixing stage, comes in fresh and enthusiatic, free of history, and trusts his gifted ears. Dan listens to feel, to the skeleton of the song, and draws attention to things that everybody else has stopped noticing. Flood reawakens sleeping songs with brilliantly original mixes after we've all gone home. I trust my instincts, wax doubtful or enthusiastic, grumble Englishly and liberally contradict myself. It's because the lyricist assumes the really specific job of focusing the music, of pointing it somewhere.
Words are very sharp objects.
On a vocal day, Bono appears with numerous written sheets which he fans out over the floor of the control room. Bono gets singing, jumping physcially and conceptually through the emerging song, weaving lyrical threads into bigger patterns. Meaning is chiselled out bit by bit, polished, broadned, inverted, discarded, revived. Close attention is paid to subtle shift of vocal tone and emphasis. Homeless lines wander hopefully from verse to verse.