With or Without You
U2
How to study this song
“With or Without You” carries 14 English words, 4 adjectives and 19 verb forms — 37 study entries in all, graded A2-. Start with the glossary: stone, eyes and thorn come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 19 distinct forms against 4 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| stone | piedra | pietra | pierre | pedra | steen | Stein |
| eyes | ojos | occhi | yeux | olhos | ogen | Augen |
| thorn | espina | spina | épine | espinho | doorn | Dorn |
This card holds 11 more words. You meet them when you play the song.
Adjectives
What this song teaches you
Level · A2-
- Vocabulary words
- 14
- Adjectives
- 4
- Word combos
- 4
- Expressions
- 13
- Verb forms
- 19
- Quiz questions
- 35
More English songs at this level
Background
About the song
«With or Without You» is the song that turned U2 from a successful rock band into one of the biggest acts in the world. It was released by Island Records on 16 March 1987 as the first single from «The Joshua Tree», the group’s fifth studio album, which had come out a week earlier. It is the third track on the record, and it was produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, the same pair who had worked with the band on «The Unforgettable Fire» three years before. Bono wrote the words, and the music is credited to the whole band.
The song took a long time to find its shape. It began as a rough demo recorded at the end of 1985 at the house of the drummer, Larry Mullen Jr., with a chord sequence that Bono had come up with. The first studio attempts went badly, and The Edge later admitted that he found those early versions very poor. The breakthrough came in 1986, during sessions at Danesmoate House, a Georgian house in Dublin that the band used as a studio. The Canadian musician Michael Brook had given The Edge a prototype of a device he had invented, the «Infinite Guitar», which lets a note ring on for as long as the player wants. The Edge recorded his part with it in only two takes, and that long, floating sound became the signature of the track.
Another important figure was the Irish singer and artist Gavin Friday, a childhood friend of Bono. When the producers had moved on to other songs, Friday kept working on this one with Bono, rearranged it and insisted that it could be a hit. The band’s manager, Paul McGuinness, was not convinced: he thought it sounded too strange for radio. Friday predicted a number one, and he turned out to be right.
The lyric is about a relationship in which the singer can find no peace. He is kept waiting, he feels trapped and hurt, and yet he cannot imagine his life without the other person either. Bono wrote it during a trip to the south of France in 1986, when he was trying to reconcile two sides of his own life: the travelling rock musician and the married man. Many listeners also hear a spiritual dimension in it, a struggle between surrender and resistance, and the long middle section about giving oneself up has been read both as a love confession and as a kind of prayer. The song never tells a story in detail; it works through images of pain, storms and waiting.