You’re packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been.
I don’t like endings or goodbyes, but I love songs about them. That’s something that will become abundantly clear as this series continues, if it’s not clear already. And there are very few songs about endings or goodbyes that matter more to me more than “Walk On,” an utterly splendid highlight from U2’s 2000 comeback album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
Up until 2004, almost all the music I loved had been made in my lifetime. I was drawn to the music of right now, often finding older songs or records to sound dated. I remember listening to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. at some point and thinking it sounded positively ancient. (Sorry, Boss!) All those ‘80s synthesizers struck me as plasticky and passe, and I struggled to appreciate the songs underneath. It wasn’t just ‘80s synths that made my no-fly list either: I checked out The Beatles’ Rubber Soul around that same time, and found it to sound hopelessly old-fashioned.
In 2004, U2 became the first band to break through that barrier for me. It didn’t hurt, of course, that they were still a relevant band of the moment. They’d had massive hits in 2000 and 2001 with “Beautiful Day” and “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”; in 2002, they’d played a Super Bowl halftime show – for my money, the greatest one of all time, with apologies to Prince; and they were currently enjoying a new level of omnipresence thanks to a stylish iPod commercial, featuring their new single “Vertigo,” that got played on every single ad break of every single prime time television program for approximately 3-6 months.
“Vertigo” was hugely successful and hugely inescapable, and all that success and inescapability made me extremely hyped to hear the new U2 album that fall. It didn’t disappoint: I unwrapped How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, on CD, that Christmas morning, alongside my first-ever iPod, and it fittingly became the first album I ever uploaded on to said iPod. Apple’s marketing team probably would have loved to hear how I fell for their ad campaign hook, line, and sinker. But I didn’t have any misgivings about corporate synergy or cynical capitalism back then. All I cared about was the songs and whether I thought they were good. And the songs on Atomic Bomb were damn good – particularly “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” an incredibly painful eulogy Bono wrote for his then-recently-departed father; and “City of Blinding Lights,” a classic, titanic U2 stadium anthem.
The best thing about Atomic Bomb, though, might have been how it made me curious to check out U2’s back catalog. My familiarity with the band, at that point, really only reached back to the singles from All That You Can’t Leave Behind. But my parents had a pair of U2 albums in their CD collection, and as I copied every CD within reach to my new 20-gigabyte iPod, those two albums – The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby – landed near the top of my “must listen” list.
It took me awhile to appreciate the zany, technicolor grime of Achtung Baby, but I was sold on The Joshua Tree right away – particularly the endless guitar intro to “Where the Streets Have No Name” that kicks off the album. U2 were already getting played on classic rock radio in 2004, but The Joshua Tree sounded so modern to me. There was something about this band’s big, majestic sound that instantly connected to so much of the music I was listening to at the time. It’s probably not a stretch to say that every song I have so far written about for this series has at least a little bit of U2 in its DNA. You don’t have to try very hard to find a line between U2 and something like Jimmy Eat World’s Futures, for instance, given all its anthemic choruses and atmospheric guitar crescendos. Thanks to those kinds of reference points, The Joshua Tree broke the seal on my unspoken “no older music” rule, and I spent eighth grade falling in love with a lot of records that had been made before I was born, from Billy Joel’s The Stranger to The Eagles’ Hotel California to R.E.M.’s Document.
The Joshua Tree also transformed U2 from a band I kind liked into a new obsession, and soon I had set to work digging into the band’s other work. The first priority? Getting my hands on a copy of All That You Can’t Leave Behind, an album I loved the singles from but had never heard in full. Armed with the $100 in Amazon gift certificates I’d received for Christmas, I bought myself that album, along with half a dozen other CDs on my “must hear” list. (Other post-Christmas 2004 purchases: Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity, Modest Mouse’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News, The Ataris’ So Long, Astoria, Fastball’s The Harsh Light of Day, Five for Fighting’s The Battle for Everything, and a box set of the first three Switchfoot albums.)
When All That You Can’t Leave Behind arrived, it went into regular rotation and arguably got even more play than Atomic Bomb. I was especially drawn to the lesser-known songs. I loved “Kite,” a companion to “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” about the complex bonds between parents and children, and about how those bonds get even more tangled when you drag mortality into the equation. I loved “Peace on Earth,” a pleading hymn for a utopian concept that seems increasingly remote as the years go by; I still treat it like a Christmas song every December. I loved “Grace,” an elegant slow-burn that fits into the long tradition of U2 closing tracks that do something a little different than what you’d expect.
My very favorite song on All That You Can’t Leave Behind, then and now, is called “Walk On.” I’d actually first heard that tune in the spring of 2004, half a year before Atomic Bomb dropped, and months before U2 started seriously popping up on my radar. On the night the sitcom Friends went off the air, “Walk On” was featured prominently in a documentary special NBC aired right before the series finale. (Coincidentally, the day this article posts is the 21st anniversary of the Friends finale; go figure!) I’d never watched that show prior to the final few weeks, but I tuned in for the last few episodes because I was curious about the phenomenon of it all. Even knowing next to nothing about the characters or the series, that final episode hit me as a stirring bon voyage, and I think part of it had to do with “Walk On.” Here was this song about not being afraid to leave things behind and forge on to find your destiny, and it was soundtracking the end of this show that had gone on this big, epic 10-year journey. Even without taking in the full 10-year scope of the show (yet) I could sense the poignance of the occasion.
The end of Friends and my discovery of “Walk On” dovetailed with the end of my seventh-grade year – a significant tidbit given that the school I’d attended since first grade only ran through eighth grade. Each year, as part of the graduation ceremony for the outgoing eighth-graders, the teachers put together one of those photo slide shows set to music – you know, the ones that are normally accompanied by Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” or maybe Vitamin C’s “Graduation.” (I believe that year’s edition also included the Train song “Drops of Jupiter.”) I decided right then and there that, 1) my class would need a more unique soundtrack to send us on our way one year later, and 2) I was going to do everything in my power to make sure “Walk On” was part of that soundtrack.
A year later, in May 2005, the teachers put out a call for students to submit songs they wanted to hear as part of the slideshow. I burned a CD with “Walk On” on it, turned it in for consideration, and crossed my fingers. I wouldn’t know until graduation night if the song had made the cut.
When the slideshow started to play, the first song to come through the speakers was unfamiliar to me. I Googled the lyrics later and found the tune: “Life in a Northern Town,” a gorgeously wistful little folk-pop song released in 1985 by British band The Dream Academy. The second track to pop up was the obvious one: “Good Riddance,” because what would a middle school graduation be without the most “middle school graduation” song of all time.
As the Green Day song drew to a close, I held my breath, because I knew the slideshow was usually only long enough to allow for three songs. It was the moment of truth: Was my pick going to get played?
And then I heard it: the telltale tambourine rattle that heralds the start of “Walk On,” and Bono delivering a spoken-word mantra: “And love is not the easy thing, the only baggage you can bring is all that you can’t leave behind.” I breathed a sigh of relief as The Edge’s chiming guitar line cascaded into the song, and I think I had tears in my eyes by the time Bono had made it halfway through his first verse: “And if the darkness is to keep us apart/And if the daylight feels like it’s a long way off/And if your glass heart should crack/And for a second you turn back/Oh no, be strong/Walk on.”
It was incredibly moving, sitting with my classmates that night and watching the past decade of our lives literally flash before our eyes. I’d like to think this song made it even more moving. The cliché graduation tunes aren’t bad songs, but I’ve always felt like they rob an incredibly significant moment of its gravity precisely because they are cliché. How special can any celebration be if it has the exact same soundtrack as everyone else’s celebration? (Unsurprisingly, I feel the exact same way about uninspired wedding “first dance” song choices.) “Walk On” wasn’t an obscure track by any means – it had even won the Record of the Year Grammy in 2002 – but it hadn’t been worn the fuck out like that Green Day song had. And so, when “Walk On” played that night, it felt like it might actually have some wisdom left for my classmates and I to learn.
I love “Walk On” because it doesn’t sugar coat anything. It doesn’t tell you the future is going to be all sunshine and rainbows. Instead, it’s a song about how there will be challenges – hurdles, stumbles, big, big mountains to climb. But it’s also a song that feels optimistic, like all those challenges are surely conquerable so long as you never surrender.
To this day, when I hear “Walk On,” I feel it deep down in my heart as a stirring reminder not to give up, no matter what happens. Whether I’m training for marathons or reckoning with the darkest political moment I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, I continue to draw an immense amount of comfort from “Walk On,” in so many different situations. To quote myself from five years ago, when I wrote about All That You Can’t Leave Behind for its 20-year anniversary: “There are a lot of songs out there that make me feel happy, sad, nostalgic, wistful, bittersweet, regretful, and a million other emotions. ‘Walk On’ is unique: it’s one of the only songs I can think of that makes me feel brave.”
U2 wrote “Walk On” for Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, but the band supposedly ended up changing their opinion of her 20 years later. I don’t know enough about the fight for freedom and democracy in Burma to tell you what transpired there, and for me, this song was never about that anyway. Some cultural critics argue that authorial intent doesn’t matter; I don’t know if I’d ever go that far. But for me, “Walk On” will always be a graduation song and a goodbye song – a song for those moments in life where everything is about to change. It’s for the chapter endings, the cliffhangers, the leaps of faith. It’s for the moments when you have to carry on even though it hurts, even though it feels scary. It’s for the hard times when you have to remind yourself to keep your head up high, and to not be afraid of the dark. And it’s for the moments when all that you can take with you, is all that you can’t leave behind.