Adam Clayton spoke with Rolling Stone's Andy Greene recently about the band's progress on Songs Of Experience and the pre-production aspects of The Joshua Tree Tour 2017. Adam was candid about his views about revisiting The Joshua Tree 30 years later, "... looking back from 30 years, the story that it tells me the most is how much I've changed and how much I need to look at good, liberal values and how the world is really looking and what I accept from the news and what I want from politics now from someone that is less likely to be standing at the barricade. I'm all in favor of new artists coming up to be people that make a lot of noise, but I'm happy to still be a part of the movement."
Adam described The Joshua Tree Tour 2017 as still in the planning stages, and the running order has not been organized as of yet. When asked if "Where The Streets Have No Name" will open the show, Adam told Greene:
We haven't really sat down and worked out the dynamics of it yet, but I suspect it would sit as the crown in the show. I think we would definitely want to open with perhaps something that is not dissimilar to the Songs of Innocence run [where we did our early 1980s songs] and get people in the mood for this thing that's coming and you give some sense of history of where it came from. Then it'll be a scene change. … This is my guess. We won't know until we start playing it around quite a bit. We will either start with "Streets," or end with it, I might think, but there will be a scene change. Whether or not we go completely in sequence, we've yet to work out. But I think it'll be the beginning of the traditional musical journey that we've always referred to in that period where the songs will take us through a version of America that certainly seemed true and possible at that time. In many ways, perhaps that was the very end of the period of thinking of America as wholesome and benevolent. Really, things have changed quite a bit from that point on. It's going to be hard to see how the country goes back to where it would like to be.
Adam said The Joshua Tree Tour 2017 is not aimed at nostalgia, rather it's "much more important to use that as a starting point of what the last 30 years have done to us all. Who are we now? How can we continue to act as members of the community and society and make changes and choices for the future?"
Adam explained that Songs Of Experience is not currently on anyone's schedule, but the band feels it needs to come out by the end of this year. "We're going to get back to that later this year and polish it off and finish it off a bit more. But we think we're there with it. It's not like the switch to do these Joshua Tree shows was because we needed a lot of time. It was just because it's pretty much in the bag. We can still work on it throughout this year, all the little nips and tucks that we want to do. ... In some ways, the experience of playing those Joshua Tree shows and those songs this summer, inevitably, couldn't help [but] have some impact on what the record ultimately becomes when we finish work on it."
As for the continuation of the Innocence + Experience Tour, Adam described it as "an indoor tour that's focused on production we had pioneered on the Innocence tour, it was going to be that production taken further."
