"Winter" Lyrics by U2
Winter is a song from the No Line on the Horizon recording sesssions. Winter appears in the war film Brothers at the request of director Jim Sheridan, and it plays over the closing credits.
Several different versions of the Winter have been recorded, including an uptempo rock arrangement on Linear
and a slower acoustic version in Brothers. Bono wrote Winter's lyrics in one night and they were revised just once after that. Tobey Maguire's character Captain Sam Cahill was the inspiration for the lyric, with the band noting that the focus on "intense hidden emotion" and the secrets he held inside "was a jumping off point, thematically."
Bono noted that film director Sheridan wanted a "complex song for a complex character" and so the band wrote two songs: "Winter" and "White as Snow". While "White as Snow" focuses more on the relationship between the Cahill brothers, "Winter's" lyrics contribute to a "more universal song about the experience of the armed forces in Afghanistan.
Winter Lyrics U2
The yellow sun
Well, it took the hand
Of a country boy
To a city in a far-off land
We made no mark
No shadow at all
On the ancient, holy streets
Where I learned to crawl
The broken and the bruised
The young and the used
The sure and confused
All here
Words will then land on me
Then abandon me
Mangle, untangle me
Leave me on the floor
Rhymes, they sprang in me
Summer sang in me
But summer sings in me no more
Now I'm twenty-five
And trying to stay alive
In a corner of the world
With no clear enemies to fight
It's hot as hell
We're like butter on toast
But there's no army in this world
That can fight a ghost
The broken and the bruised
The young and the used
The sure and confused
All here
Words will then land on me
Then abandon me
Leave me stranded
In guard of the door
Rhymes began in me
Summer sang in me
But summer sings in me no more
Listening to the cries
The strangers
The silence of the foreign grave
Listening to the thunder
The sky is strange
Stretched over everyone
Listening to the tales
The child sings
That goes for days and days
Listening to the calls
Shouts, frustration
At twenty-one
I was born a son
And on that day I knew
I could kill
To protect the ones
We put bullets in guns
Or anything it takes
To take a life until it's still
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