It can’t be a full-fledged almanac entry unless I can source it precisely (please keep this in mind when sending in quotations), but Patrick Wahl e-mailed me an undated excerpt from a USA Today story about the new U2 album, and I liked it so much that I had to pass it along anyway:
Dismantling [How to Dismantle an Atomic] Bomb‘s origins, Bono recalls an early
version of “Vertigo” that was massaged, hammered,
tweaked and lubed before it sailed through two mixes
and got U2’s unanimous stamp of “very good,” which
meant not good enough.
“Very good,” Bono says, “is the enemy of great. You
think great is right next door. It’s not. It’s in
another country.”
Well said, Mr. Bono, sir.