U2: The Best of 1980-1990

"The Edge has always managed to create a new guitar sound for each U2 album, and he had just received his infinite-sustain guitar, invented by my Canadian friend Michael Brook. It can be heard on 'With or Without You,' an infinite stratospheric sound never heard before. 'With or Without You' was ... cut to a beat box with drums added last, but in this case Adam Clayton's bass part was put on early. Adam then had the luxury of concentrating on his work with a fully arranged song structure. I say luxury because Adam is often tossed around the studio in a constant wave of evolving chord progressions. Composing in the studio as U2 does often means that the bass part has to be redone to try and catch up to the new bit that somebody just wrote. But in the case of 'With or Without You,' the chords were carved in stone. Adam chose to play a new Japanese bass he had recently acquired; a nice short-scale instrument by Ibanez" (Daniel Lanois, Soul Mining: A Musical Life, 2010, p. 81).

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