a little tiny fragment of salvation

Since I haven't seen this posted on any of the regular U2 sites and it contains some really interesting material, I thought I'd give an online push to this exclusive interview on the Best Buy site. The whole thing is interesting, but here are two excerpts relevant to this blog's narrow topic, both from Bono (altho the other band members have plenty to say in the interview):

On "Vertigo": It's a dizzy feeling, a sick feeling, when you get up to the top of something and there's only one way to go. That's not a dictionary definition; that's mine. And in my head I created a club called Vertigo with all these people in it and the music is not the music you want to hear and the people are not the people you want to be with. And then you just see somebody and she's got a cross around her neck, and you focus on it - because you can't focus on anything else. You find a little tiny fragment of salvation there.

On the book that comes with the deluxe edition of HTDAAB: We thought, why don't we put out a proper book, a real book and pour our lives of the last few years into it? So we've made nearly a million of them.... It's not for everybody, but for those that get it, I hope they enjoy it..... [Larry] came up with some very beautiful simple paintings - windows or doors, I don't really know what they are, just these planes. Edge was just up all night, as he usually is anyway, on the Internet, pulling down some weird s--t. The book follows the record, in that it starts out with fear and ends with faith. So in the fear half, Edge has got all kinds of information on how to tie up a prisoner in your own home, the art of the samurai sword, how to build your own bomb shelter. He's researched all kinds of phobias. Then when we get into the faithful half, he's found other things on trust. And I just took stuff that I'd been writing in my diary and my notebooks, from little writings, they're scrawls and very primitive art, little drawings of my dad and the occasional rude one, just to keep me amused. Adam always sees what everyone else misses, and he was aware that this was probably our last album in this studio, so he just went photographing all the little details of the album in the studio: the kitchen, the cooker, the effects pedals. He's just documented Hanover Quay. And I think in the end, when... the people have gotten used to it, they'll probably be the photographs that everyone wants.