"I'll Believe Her When She Sings" (2011)
Demo Song
Background Information
“I’ll Believe Her When She Sings” is a song that the band was originally developing between No Line on the Horizon and Songs of Innocence. At the time the band was working to complete Songs of Ascent, and had also dabbled in a couple of other projects, and “I’ll Believe Her When She Sings” was part of a ‘club music project’ they were toying with.
“I’ll Believe Her When She Sings” was first mentioned in a May 2011 interview in Hot Press magazine with writer Olaf Tyaransen. The interview was conducted in early May of that year and Bono revealed some information about a few of the new songs that the band has been working on:
No, actually we’ve got a few going (laughs). We have Songs of Ascent, which is a kind of ecstatic album, ambient, very beautiful songs. But it’s a real stained-glass window of a record, elegiac, I think you could describe some of the songs, beautiful. There’s one song called “Mount Zion,” that’s beautiful. There’s a song called “Soon”, there’s a song called “Every Breaking Wave”. Then there’s — we went in to make some club music with RedOne and we got some very extraordinary club sounding stuff, one called “I’ll Believe Her When She Sings”. Let me think if I can remember all of them now … “North Star”, that’s a ballad actually, that’s a beautiful song: we’ve actually played it acoustically onstage a little bit on the tour. And then we, the sort of rock album — although I think “rock” is the wrong word for it — the next sort of “regular U2 band” album, we started to make with Danger Mouse.
The song has not been mentioned in many years, so it may have developed into another song.