In the studio, a recording engineer might need to put walls between musicians to minimize sound lead.

Those walls are called goboes.

Goboes can be extremely helpful for getting clean, isolated recordings, but the real reason to use them is because you get to say that word a bunch of times.

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music.

I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad that you've joined me for another season talking about music recorded with goboes, without goboes, and with or without goboes.

It'll make sense in a minute. This is, as always, an entirely

listener-supported show, and thank you so much to everyone who supports strong songs on Patreon.

If you want to chip in and start getting each episode two weeks early, go to patreon.com

slash strong songs. On this season premiere, we're taking on two songs by one of the best known bands in the world.

And combined, these songs have a lot to say to one another and a lot to say to us about how

music gets made.

So let's plug in the strat, fire up the delay, and hit the streets.

Music fire up the delay and hit the streets. There is no one standard way to write a song. Sometimes a single person sits down at an

instrument and writes the entire thing in one whack. Sometimes one person writes the lyric and

someone else writes the music or one person writes one part of the song and then brings on their collaborative partner to write the other part.

And sometimes a whole group of people, musicians, producers, engineers, they all get together and they bang it out in the studio day after day until they finally decide they're done and realize they've made something beautiful together.

On this season premiere, I want to talk about not one but two songs that resulted from that kind of

process undertaken by one of the most famous bands in the world. To me, these two songs are so

fascinatingly similar despite being completely different,

and that allows for an unusual insight into the way this band makes music.

We'll be talking, of course, about Irish superstars U2

and their landmark 1987 record The Joshua Tree,

...