Bono Wild Irish Rose
In a field by a river My love and I did lie And on my naked shoulder She too proud to cry She said that I must leave her An icy tear she froze How could I melt the heart Of a wild irish rose
Well a gypsy she has made of me A servent of the street And back to bed I've travelled To taste a love as sweet Well the heart it knows no reasons And reason never knows As I lie with them I'm thinking Of a wild irish rose
Bono speaks: "This is based on a...on the time we spent in a hotel called the Millon Dollar Hotel in Los Angeles, which is downtown Los Angeles. It's like a half-way house hotel for bums and people thrown out of hospitals under the Regean era. And I was being taken through this hotel--I was doing some filming down there--and I noticed that the cheap liquor that all the bums drank was called Wild Irish Rose. So I started with the line, 'The city of Angels/Has brought a devil out in me', and developed it on from there. The Rose in Ireland, as you know, is a sort of romantic image of love, obviously, but it's also an image of Ireland itself. That is an image I thought would be nice to subvert."
Well I saw the city of angels It brought a devil out in me And hell's hotel on sunset Showed a whore no mercy As the orange sky was screaming From the roof I let her go These are the dizzying heights that brought me My wild irish rose
Now red is the rose That she layed on my grave A life is what she wanted And a life I surely gave Like a hundred men before me They lay lying here in rows Young men, bloody As a wild irish rose