U2 - Summer of Love (Acoustic Version) (Song Edit) (2018)

Here's a song edit I worked up today. I figure it's interesting and significant enough to merit a post on its own. I plan on putting this on a U2 album I'll post here eventually. But I'm slowly working my way through their career chronologically, so it'll be a while before I get to it. 

Some months ago, I came across a very nice acoustic version U2 did of their song "Summer of Love." It comes from a bootleg recording of their rehearsals for the 2018 tour. (I don't know the date or the location of the recording - if you do, please let me know.) 

Personally, I think this version is much better than the one that appeared on their 2017 album "Songs of Experience." I think this is an example of how the problems with U2's music in the last decade or so has more to do with production issues than a lack of quality material. If one strips a song all the way down to its acoustic base, there's no way to screw that up with bad production.

However, there was a very big problem with this recording that made it unusable for me. Because they were only rehearsing the song and didn't know it very well, some person shouted out the timing at key points in the song to make sure they'd stay on track. For instance, before each verse, a voice could be heard shouting, "Verse! Two, three, four." These instructions happened at other points in the song, including instrumental sections. The voice even counted out the ending. 

On top of that, the band screwed up at a couple of different points. For instance, they only played the main riff once in an instrumental section in the middle, and then lead singer Bono talked over more music, reminding the others that they should play that twice. Bono also flubbed the vocals at the beginning of the first verse, and had to try the first words a second time. These problems were too frequent and annoying for me to be able to enjoy the song. And there wasn't any clean material I could use to patch them over. 

Or so I thought. Today, I came across another acoustic version of the song on YouTube. This was played on someone's porch for a small audience in 2018. Unfortunately, it was recorded poorly, causing the vocals to be distorted, and one could hear people in the audience talking all through it. 

But I figured I could use little instrumental snippets of just three or four seconds each to patch over the problems with the rehearsal version. That's exactly what I did, and I think it worked out very well. I'll bet you won't be able to tell at which points the fixes were made. Once I had a better version without all the talking voices, I then was able to fix other problems with the instrumental sections and the intro, extending them as they intended. I even fixed some bum notes.

I dare say the end result is the best version of the song out there, in excellent sound quality. I hope you'll agree.

https://www.upload.ee/files/15239446/UTwo_SummrofLve_SongEdit.zip.html