"Love Is All We Have Left" (2006)

Demo Song

Background Information

“Love is All We Have Left” is a song that was initially developed for the No Line on the Horizon album, and appears to have been recently worked on for Songs of Experience.

In May 2006 during a television interview, done while Bono was in Africa, this song was mentioned for the first time. Bono named this as a song that he had recently written and called this an “old Broadway tune, I thought it was a Frank Sinatra song”.

In July 2008, the song was again mentioned in the Sunday Mirror as one of the possible tracks for inclusion on No Line on the Horizon.

In September 2016, Morleigh, wife of The Edge, posted a video of a cat sleeping, and in the background was a short clip which may have been U2 performing this song, as we could hear a female voice singing and then Bono coming in to sing “Love, love is all we have left”. Only 8 seconds of the song was shared, and it was quickly removed from Instagram.

The song most recently was mentioned in an interview with Rolling Stone, where Bono brings up the song:

That same conversation also opens the album with a song called” Love Is All We Have Left.” My favorite opening line to a U2 album: “There’s nothing to stop this being the best day ever.” In the second verse, innocence admonishes experience: “Now you’re at the other end of the telescope, seven billion stars in her eyes, so many stars so many ways of seeing, hey, this is no time not to be alive.” It’s a chilling moment – in the chorus I was pretending to be Frank Sinatra singing on the moon, a sci-fi torch song “love, love is all we have left, a baby cries on the doorstep, love is all we have left.“ 

The conversation he is discussing at the opening of that quote is the one between innocence and experience, a discussion that also appears in the song “The Little Things That Give You Away”.

“Love is All We Have Left” is expected to appear on the album Songs of Experience.

Related Demo Titles