But love left a window in the skies, and to love I rhapsodize; I've got no shame.

Thanks to the many readers who wanted to make sure I knew that the new U2 song "Window in the Skies" had been played on radio and was circulating via MP3. (Everyone make sure and buy it, now.) My random comments:

As for the early hype, I'm not sure it's exactly "the eternal song every generation has to sing," and where I come from they call that 12/8 (but hey, it's compound meter at least.) Poppy, thick, Oasis/ Beatles/ Coldplay, definitely a different kind of mix than we've gotten used to recently. And amidst all the standard U2 harmonic retrogressions, it's striking to hear an actual normal 7th chord in there once at the end of the verses - not that they give us a resolution to it.

On the lyrics to U2's "Window in the Skies," random comments about the sort of constellation of language: I don't find the string of atonement/ resurrection images at the beginning all that compelling because they're mostly so familiar already. I do like "the rule has been disproved" characterizing the Resurrection if it goes with the next line, or the end of the Law if we're being more abstract (in which case you might want to cross-reference the stanza to Col 2's reference to Christ "who is the head of all rule... canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands" on the Cross.) And what about that intriguing "the grain [?] is now a groove"? - I don't hear "the grave," as some people do. [edit later: well, maybe it is "grave" after all. Huh.] Still, I might want to suggest we not rule out quite yet "the grade" as in the grade of a steep hill, cf. Isaiah 40:4, a section of the Bible the band cited as encapsulating their vocation in that CD Dream Depot was selling.

One question that I haven't had time to think over: is "the stone has been removed" perhaps the first specific Easter morning image in a U2 song?

The middle stanzas feel a little fresher to me, with images that are a bit more open and unexpected.

The refrain's "can't you see what love has done" rhetorical device: again, so familiar in Christian homiletics and hymnody it's hard to hear it without baggage. ("Count your many blessings; see what God has done..." and so on.) Plus there's the more recent Jaci Velasquez CCM tune "Look What Love Has Done" ("Now those stars, they look like windows into another world. Look what love has done to me.")

For any from a liturgical background, when you put together the atonement imagery, the resurrection imagery, the image of the skies having been opened and left open henceforth by "love," and the chorus, it's hard not to locate the song rhetorically among the themes of the Easter season, maybe just before or just after Ascension, and hear the refrain as living somewhere in the neighborhood of Psalm 66: "Come and see what God has done... Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue."

All this said, do I personally like it? Eh.