Mysterious Ways Gloria U2

Mysterious Ways Album: Achtung Baby (1991)
Gloria Album: October (1981)
by U2

In this song, the main character, Johnny, has an epiphany through an encounter with a mysterious feminine being. To explain, we turn to Into The Heart by Niall Stokes.

"It's a song about a man living on little or no romance," Bono says. "It's a song about women - or a woman - but it's addressed to him."

Bono talks a bit about theology and about El Shaddai - the third and least used name for God in the Bible, which translates as "the breasted one."

"I've always believed that the spirit is a feminine thing," he says.

"Mysterious Ways" is not about a particular woman. It is about women in general, and the way they entrance, and often dominate men. Says Bono, "At times I do tend to idealize women. It's easy to fall into the trap of separating them into angels and devils for the sake of the drama. But there's no way that there's ever anything anti-women involved. Our songs are not politically correct. They are written from a man's point of view. He's wrestling with different things, there's a flash of anger and hurt here and there. But I don't think women come out badly."

Bono got the idea for this song from a conversation he had with Rev. Jack Heaslip, whom the band met when they were students at Mount Temple Secondary School and he was a guidance counselor. Heaslip became a trusted advisor to the band and a sounding board for questions about spirituality and religion.

"He mused on the idea that the gender of God is not clear in the original biblical Hebrew," Bono wrote in his memoir Surrender. "In fact one of the names of God, El Shaddai, means 'the breasted one.' If the greatest creative force in the world is a woman giving birth, then of course the greatest creative force in the universe is likely to be a feminine spirit."

While recording this in Berlin, U2 came up with the basis for their song "One." In a rush of creativity, they put together "One" and finished "Mysterious Ways" later. This was very refreshing for the band - they were having a hard time coming up with anything and even considered breaking up.

The line, "If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel - on your knees boy!" is probably a reference to oral sex, although it can have a more innocent religious meaning, like kneeling on a pew.

Bono performed this on the Zoo TV tour in character as The Fly, a parody of an egomaniacal rock star, wearing huge sunglasses and leather.
This was the second single from the Achtung Baby album. The first single was "The Fly," which did well globally but stiffed in America, reaching just #61. "Mysterious Ways" went to #9 in the US and got lots of airplay on a variety of formats. "One" was the next single, and it was also a big hit in America and around the world.

Recording the album was challenging, but ultimately very rewarding. So much so that Daniel Lanois, who produced it with Brian Eno, cites it as his favorite collaboration.

"I do appreciate the collaborative feeling that we had on Achtung Baby, which is a U2 record we made in Germany," he told Songfacts. "What was great about that was there were a lot of very talented, smart people in a room wanting the very best for everybody. That is the true meaning of collaboration."

Lanois, who has also worked on albums with Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan and many others, has a long association with U2. He first worked with them on their The Unforgettable Fire album in 1984.

Directed by Stephane Sednaoui, the video was shot in Morocco with a belly dancer portraying the woman who "moves in mysterious ways." When U2 embarked on their Zoo TV tour in 1992, they returned to this motif, with a belly dancer appearing on stage when they performed the song. After the first leg of the tour, Morleigh Steinberg, who did some choreography for the band, became the dancer. She ended up taking up with The Edge, whose marriage collapsed while the band was recording the Achtung Baby album. Steinberg and The Edge had two children together and got married in 2002.

A dance remix by Paul Oakenfold became popular in clubs.
Speaking to American Songwriter, the Edge explained how Daniel Lanois transformed the song. "At the time we were working on it in Berlin, it had no chorus," he said. "It was a groove, a great verse idea, and that was all we had. Bono went into the other room to work on chorus ideas for 'Mysterious Ways.' I came back in and I was showing Adam (Clayton, bass) what the chord changes were, and Danny goes 'Let's play those back to back,' so I played the two chord progressions back to back and we all just went, 'Oh, that's a great combination of sequences. Let's try that out in the room."

Gloria is my mother's name. Gloria is Latin for "Glory," and the Latin refrain of "In Te Domine" means "In You Lord." (Did you know: Bono's stage name was originally Bono Vox, which is Latin for "Good Voice"). Like all but the most scholarly among us, Bono is not fluent in Latin. He did know some Latin words - mostly because of church - and with tape rolling, he sang what came to him. The challenge then was to translate what he had sung, so he left the studio to find a Latin dictionary but found something better: a friend who had studied the language and could translate for him.

Released on U2's second album, October, "Gloria" is a spiritual song reflecting the Christian beliefs of Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen (bass player Adam Clayton was not as devout). Early on, U2 infused worship messages in their songs, and almost broke up the band when they feared it conflicted with their faith.

With lyrics like, "I try to stand up, but I can't find my feet," Bono is supplicating to a higher power. He explained to Musician magazine in 1983: "I had this feeling of everything waiting on me, and I was just naked, nothing to offer. So I went through this process of wrenching what was inside myself outside of myself."

Some of Bono's lyrics and vocals were inspired by an album of Gregorian chants that their manager, Paul McGuinness, had given him.
The music video was the second from U2 (following "I Will Follow") and their first in the MTV era. Directed by Meiert Avis, it shows the band performing the song in Dublin in the same place the October album cover was shot. It was the first U2 video shot outdoors, something they did on many others over the next few years because they liked the lighting.

Adam Clayton played a bass solo on this track, something he rarely did.

Bono (from the book Race Of Angels): "I actually really like that lyric. It was written really quickly. I think it expresses the thing of language again, this thing of speaking in tongues, looking for a way out of language. 'I try to sing this song... I try to stand up but I can't find my feet.' And taking this Latin thing, this hymn thing. It's so outrageous at the end going to the full Latin whack. That still makes me smile. It's so wonderfully mad and epic and operatic. And of course Gloria is about a woman in the Van Morrison sense. Being an Irish band, you're conscious of that. And I think that what happened at that moment was very interesting: people saw that you could actually write about a woman in the spiritual sense and that you could write about God in the sexual sense. And that was a moment. Because before that there had been a line. That you can actually sing to God, but it might be a woman? Now, you can pretend it's about God, but not a woman!

"Gloria" was modestly successful throughout Europe but in America was mostly constrained to college radio stations and didn't chart. Most listeners heard it for the first time on the Under A Blood Red Sky live album, which was released in 1983 after U2's third album, War, took off. "Gloria" was the only track from October included on the album, and along with "Party Girl," one of two songs on the tracklist recorded June 5, 1983 at the Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado.

U2 played this at concerts throughout the '80s, then brought it back in 2005 for their Vertigo tour.

Van Morrison released an unrelated song of the same name in 1964. A fellow Irishman who U2 admired, Morrison's "Gloria" is considered a classic.

Steve Lillywhite produced this song along with the first three U2 albums. He had form for getting the most out of young bands with audacious lead singers: He also produced the first two Psychedelic Furs albums around this time.