[potsie]

While the band has continually raised the bar for large scale touring in terms of technology, etc.. I personally wouldn't mind seeing them scale it back on their next tour, if there is one. Instead of stadiums or arenas, how about multiple nights in smaller venues similar to their Apollo Theater show earlier this year, which kicked ass.

Sure, tickets would probably be impossible to get, but it would be cool to see them just rock out on a simplified stage without all the extra bells and whistles. It would also free up the setlist to feature a little more variety, as the show wouldn't be nearly as choreographed as the big arena shows.

I would love to see this as well but I think it would be difficult to pull off. With small venues demand goes through the roof and tickets end up being bought and sold in secondary markets for huge profit. Scalpers benefit but the band doesn't. If you could somehow get the tickets into the hands of the true fans, it would be great.

I liked the last two albums, but I think it's time for them to scale back the way they record in the studio as well. There's some excellent material on both SOI and SOE, but some of it suffers from overly excessive/glossy production. And with all those producers, there are just too many cooks in the kitchen so to speak. Lord knows they're at a point in their career now where they could easily write a batch of songs and record an album quickly and live-off-the-floor, without over-cooking or over-thinking it. This would probably be difficult for a guy like the Edge, who is known to be obsessive about the recording & mixing process, but I honestly think it would breathe new life into the process and would energize the band in a fresh new way. They need to get into a studio with somebody like Adam Kasper or Rick Rubin and just bash it out for once.

Songs of Experience, from a commercial standpoint, was not a success. My hope is that this is the death knell for Bono's chase of mainstream trendiness, which he seems to define by radio play or Spotify spins. He needs to shut out the outside music world, forget about being relevant to millenials by getting the latest hot rapper or pop star to appear on the record and ignore producers of the moment like Ryan Tedder or David Guetta. I want U2 to get back to being a ROCK band and not a pop-rock Coldplay-like band. If I could pick one song that I'd like to define the sound of the next album it would be "Crumbs from Your Table". My feeling is that it is going to be a number of years before we hear from U2 again, which would be a shame.