"Bullet" is one of the few Joshua Tree non-singles to remain a live U2 staple- its bluster hints at the band's current broad aesthetic- but it's slightly out of place among a record mostly characterized by its grace, subtlety, introspection, and beauty.
Smartly, U2 balanced those personal songs with more universal tracks, often with an emphasis on forgotten people and forgotten places around the globe: "Red Hill Mining Town" (about the mid-80s UK miners strike), "Exit" (inspired by Norman Mailer's Gary Gilmore tome The Executioner's Song), "Mothers of the Disappeared" (about Argentina's murdered political dissidents), and "Bullet the Blue Sky" (about U.S. U2 have always flirted with charismatic Christianity, and the Joshua Tree songwriting process finds the band in a particularly reflective mood "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and" "With or Without You" are steeped in religious imagery, but even their constant radio rotation hasn't robbed these introspective songs of their potency or effectiveness. It's an album made for dusty, empty flyover country. Reunited with producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, it's as if the band finally took a moment to ponder the wide-open American spaces it had been traveling through for years and applied those musical and cultural observations to its songs. The album was nowhere near as strident as War or as radically overwrought as The Unforgettable Fire (which was, lest one forget, recorded in a frickin' castle). Funnily enough, while The Joshua Tree once and for all catapulted U2 to permanent superstardom, the album marks something of a conscious refinement of the group's sound.
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