In the next hour, U2 are expected to announce, "The Greatest Show On Earth", the third single from the upcoming 16th studio album "Carnaval De Luz". The song will be accompanied by a music video directed by Anton Corbijn, and very likely an announcement for U2's upcoming world tour in 2027. As needed, a separate submission will cover any tour news.

Official music video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUuVOW7XogA

Links to streaming platforms:
Apple Music - https://music.apple.com/us/song/the-greatest-show-on-earth/6812412674
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/track/1nuMwM4FenyuzMbcmx6Lxk
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUuVOW7XogA

Additional coverage on social media and news outlets will be allowed in the main subreddit and locked or diverted here as necessary to avoid clutter. Please keep the majority of your comments, reactions, impressions etc in this thread.

Official commentary about the song:

All that said, the band is trying to come up with a radio edit of Bono’s favorite new track, the five-and-a-half-minute “The Greatest Show on Earth.” “It’s maybe our greatest song in a very long time,” he says. “That was a reason to stay in the band.” The slow-burning, IMAX-sized epic takes on a shattered love affair, with some shots at Christian nationalism along the way (“Is this a church of love or fear?/Have we made God feel like a stranger here?”). It aims to capture some of the ecstatic, crooning heartbreak of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” with a hint of Bertolt Brecht: “Love is a business that works at night/I sold myself for less than was right.” Bono had the title for a long time, but catching Elvis Presley sing “Lovin’ Feelin'” in his friend Baz Luhrmann’s recent concert film helped him crack the elegiac concept for the song: “We were once the greatest show on earth.” “There may be,” he says, unable to help himself, “a version of it that we can get on the radio.”

Excerpt from "U2 Dream It All Up Again", Rolling Stone Magazine by Brian Hiatt September 28 2026:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/u2-cover-story-carnaval-de-luz-larry-mullen-dolly-parton-1235631171/

This week's song of the week is "When I Look at the World" off of All That You Can't Leave Behind. The track was not a singe and has never been played live by the band. Despite this, it has generated plenty of discussion amongst listeners (especially in academic circles analyzing the track's lyrics). In the book U2 and Philosophy: How to Decipher an Atomic Band several philosophers share thoughts on the track; while Bono himself can be credited with a lengthy exposition in U2 by U2.

"EDGE: Adam. Larry and myself recorded that track on our own very quickly and then I overdubbed some guitar parts. At the end of the album sessions, everyone said, 'Great guitar sounds, Edge. How did you get them?' and couldn't remember because it happened so quickly. So I was left thinking. Shit, how am I going to play that live?' I had no idea. And actually. I don't think we ever did play it live. But I like the lyrical idea of seeing the world through someone else's perspective, and their perspective being the thing that makes the world seem OK. I certainly can relate to that. As you get older there is a danger that you can become so negative about everything because your disappointment starts to overwhelm your sense of the possible. One of the great things about having kids is that the possibilities start to become larger again." (The Edge on the track in U2 by U2)

...

What's the Word?

Philosopher Mark Wrathall, currently posted at the prestigious Oxford University, wrote his dissertation and edited his U2 book under the tutelage of one of the most famous American philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus. Wrathall writes of "When I Look at the World":

For Heidegger, faith is a mode of existence—a way of acting and living—that reveals the world, and Christian faith arises out of the world as it is revealed through faith in Christ. Note the circular character of this description—faith is a way of living in the world that arises from the world being dis closed or revealed through faith. To have faith, then, the world must be able to support a certain mode of existence—certain practices and dispositions—but the world only shows up in a such a way that it can support that mode of existence to one who already has the mode of existence. The Christian world is, in other words, “a place that has to be believed to be seen” ('Walk On”). Pascal, in a similar way, noted that “it is clear that those with a keen faith in their hearts can see straightaway that everything which exists is the work of the God they worship.” On the other hand, “those in whom this light [of faith] has been extinguished, . . . scrutinizing with all their intelligence every thing they see in nature which can lead them to this knowledge . . . find[] only obscurity and darkness” (Pensées, §644, p. 139).

 U2 expresses precisely this same Pascalian-Heideggerian view in songs like “When I Look at the World.” On such a view, we are no longer worried about our failure to find cognitive ver ification of our faith in the world. Instead, we are satisfied if a Christian experience of the world shows us how to see this world without “blinking” or “looking away.” Addressing a saint like figure—a person who’s learned to feel the world in the right way—the singer longs to “see what you see” “when you look at the world.” Cognitively, the saint’s Christian faith remains deferred (“your thoughts are too expensive / to ever want to keep”). But through her faith, she can inhabit the world without despair—she has “an expression / So clear and so true / That it changes the atmosphere / When you walk into the room.” U2’s longing has become not the longing to escape the world—to be up with the Sun—but the longing “to be like you / to feel it like you do...

The existential Christian thus argues that faith is confirmed if it turns out that it is only the Christian who, through the saving grace of Christ, is able to resolve her despair. U2’s music shows a similar understanding of the validity of faith—the true posses sor of faith is the saint of “When I look at the World,” rather than the superstitious preacher of signs and wonders in “Crumbs From Your Table.” “When there’s all kinds of chaos / and every one is walking lame,” the saint doesn’t even “blink . . . or look away”—that is, she’s not tempted at all to make the pessimistic move of renouncing the world (Wrathall in Wrathall)

Wrathall, as we can see, ties the song deeply to theology. The somewhat pathetic sounding man "Tell me, tell me..." is galvanized as baring himself to Jesus on the cross. Timothy Cleveland, in the same volume, gives an analysis in a similar theological register:

It is no wonder that U2, a band known for its religious sentiments and commitments, should plead the case for feeling as a way not only to have direct awareness of oneself and immediate connection to other people but as a way to relate directly to God. The song “When I Look at the World” seems to be sung in the voice of one who cannot experience such a feeling but recognizes the lack from seeing another who can: “So I try to be like you / Try to feel it like you do,” but “I can’t see what you see . . . (Cleveland ibid)

However, again writing in the same volume, Jennifer McClinton Temple and Abigail Myers use a perspective of a loving ethics of "care", to offer an alternative reading. Notice how her reading is arguably almost absent of theology:

He speaks (In Beautiful Day) of finding some one to whom you can “lend a hand / in return for grace.” We should cancel the debt because we are all connected, not because, as a utilitarian might say, because it would mean the greater good for the greatest number of people. 

Other songs, especially three from All that You Can’t Leave Behind, emphasize the importance of connection in terms of how one sees the world. “When I Look at the World,” and “Kite,” both have the speaker finding meaning by looking through the eyes of others, and “Beautiful Day” extols the con nectedness of all of us in our search for happiness. “Connected knowing,” is an important component of the ethics of care, for how we know helps us develop our ethics and make decisions based on those ethics. Connected knowing points us toward ethics of care, and not toward other ethical systems, because it helps us resist universality and abstraction. For instance, “Beautiful Day,” was written in response to the Jubilee 2000 effort to cancel the unpayable debt of the world’s poorest coun tries. The United States had recently committed to the cancella tion of $435 million dollars of debt, and Bono was celebrating (McLinton Temple ibd)

...

Bono's own exegesis of the song, coming from U2 by U2, slightly confuses me. As on the one hand, he claims a kind of pride over his faith surviving the Omagh Bombing (an attack perpetrated by the IRA which claimed 29 innocent lives), but then says the lyrics are "from the perspective of someone who is having a crisis of faith". Perhaps the lyrics are best described as autobiographical, perhaps not:

I was very shaken by the Omagh bombing but the reason my faith survived it. the reason it can survive any awfulness the world can throw at it. is that I am not surprised by evil. To me, we live in a jungle and I'm expecting at any moment that something will try and eat me. I'm on tenterhooks. I'm more surprised when the punch isn't thrown. But that does not make me cynical. In fact, rather the opposite. I'm amazed at people's ability to sacrifice for each other. I'm amazed at how people can show love where it's not expected and how love can conjoin disparate groups. I'm just amazed at human beings. But I'm never surprised when the weather turns nasty and I try to plan for it. I love it because the sun is up, and I am ready for the moment when it's not.

Not everyone around me feels the same. I have seen people's faith rocked by tragedy, some people very close to me. That is what the song When I Look At The World' is about. It is a tender song but also quite tough. I have heard it suggested that it is a portrait of Ali. I have certainly been guilty of putting Ali on a pedestal in the past, which can be dehumanizing because it rids people of their complexity. But here is a confession, on this song, I have put myself on the pedestal. It is written from the point of view of someone who is having a crisis of faith looking at someone who has built their house upon the rock. When there is all kind of chaos / And everyone is walking lame Yon don't even blink now do you ? / Or even look away / So I try to be like you / Try to feel it like you do / But without you it's no use I I can't see what you see / When I look at the world. The last image is quite cold. It is almost annoyed with someone for their faith. I'm in the waiting-room / I can't see you for the smoke / I think ofyou and your holy book / While the rest of us choke. I don't know why it is set in a hospital waiting-room in the days when people could smoke in such places. It is so heavy, I can hardly think about it. It could almost be the voice of my father, looking at me. The glower. The put-down. But that is the thing that runs right through that album, that gives it its cohesiveness, the ring of truth, connecting with what was going on in my life, connecting to my father and to my mother, which is probably what it all really comes back to, because I haven't been in a waiting room filled with smoke since I was fourteen years old. I am always amazed when stuff like that comes out. (Bono in U2 by U2)

Iris Murdoch and Moral "Imaging"

For whatever reason, which I won't get into now exactly, I see a deep connection between the thoughts of Iris Murdoch's "moral vision" and the thoughts outlayed in the song and the above quotes. Rather than delve too deeply into the quotes here, I just want to share the quotes and have them stand here on their own. How are we to connect these thoughts from an earlier Oxfrod philosopher, and known atheist, to the views presented above? The first is described as being, for better or worse, "emblematic" of Murdoch's philosophy by Murdoch scholar Hannah Marije Altorf:

"A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tirelessly juvenile. M does not like D's accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. Let us assume for purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very "correct" person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way. We might underline this aspect of the example by supposing that the young couple have emigrated or that D is now dead: the point being to ensure that whatever is in question as happening happens entirely in M's mind.

Thus much for M's first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question-begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: "I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again." Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters. If we take D to be now absent or dead this can make it clear that the change is not in D's behavior but in M's mind. D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on. And as I say, ex hypothesi M's outward behavior, beautiful from the start, in no way alters.

I used above words such as "just" and "intelligent" which implied a favorable value judgment on M's activity: and I want in fact to imagine a case where one would feel approval of M's change of view. But of course in real life, and this is of interest, it might be very hard to decide whether what M was doing was proper or not, and opinions might differ. M might be moved by various motives: a sense of justice, attempted love for D, lover for her son, or simply reluctance to think of him as unfortunate or mistaken. Some people might say "she deludes herself" while others would say she was moved by love or justice. I am picturing a case where I would find the latter description appropriate." (Murdoch “The Idea of Perfection”)

...

The next quote(s) are drawn from another of Murdoch's more well known essays, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts"

"Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god. Kant’s conclusive exposure of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, his analysis of the limitations of speculative reason, together with his eloquent portrayal of the dignity of rational man, has had results which might possibly dismay him. How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d’être of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal; and since he is not a Hegelian (Kant, not Hegel, has provided Western ethics with its dominating image) his alienation is without cure. He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer (Murdoch Soveriginity of Good Over Other Concepts)

… 
“The good man is humble; he is very unlike the big neo-Kantian Lucifer. He is much more like Kierkegaard’s tax collector” (Ibid)

A final couple of quotes from Altorf demonstrate a sort of "State of the art" (literally) analysis of Murdoch's reading of Kant.

"Murdoch often returns to Kant as a thinker who, as she once put it, 'was marvellously near the mark' or who 'followed a sound instinct but, in my view, looked in the wrong place' (see respectively Murdoch 1997: 216 and 368). In Kant's philosophy Murdoch locates the presence of many aspects of contemporary thought that she disputes. Numerous examples may be given here and her imagery is not always gentle: 'Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer' (Murdoch 1997 : 366). Yet, Murdoch considers Kant only partly to blame for the ideas that have ensued from his work. She also returns to it to pursue his 'sound instincts'. This dual attitude towards Kant's philosophy (as well as the slightly condescending remarks) one encounters also in the chapter on imagination  Altjorf pg 74)

...

“It may have this freedom, for the aesthetic imagination is limited by Kant to what Murdoch calls the 'small corner' of art. In contrast, Murdoch intends to take the aesthetic imagination out of its corner restricted to art. Her discussion here is occasionally bewildering. Arguments explored in detail elsewhere are omitted here, or succinctly referred to.19 Murdoch regularly switches between discussing the beautiful, the sublime and genius, without indicating clearly that she is doing so. The present argument consequently relies on these earlier discussions of Kant, in particular 'The Sublime and the Good' and 'The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited', as the discussion in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is hard to render on its own. “ (Altorf on murdoc pg 77)

The emboldened fragment drives into the heart of Murdoch's point of view. Imagination, not so much, or merely, in the almost reductively childish "the world is a play-place" sense, but more in the sense of the framing used/narrative played out in a great novels or films like "Schindler's List" (obviously placed in a high-ethical register, but Murdoch would argue all great art relies on such moral 'images' at bottom. However, she is famously very restrictive on what novels count as "philosophical"--See Murdoch discuss the issue of philosophical novels; and the idea of the demarcation of philosophy from literature here on BBC's In Our Time in 1977), the words chosen by great political leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., or even Bono himself.

...

Lyrics:

"When you look at the world
What is it that you see?
People find all kinds of things
That bring them to their knees
I see an expression
So clear and so true
That it changes the atmosphere
When you walk into the room"

The song opens by asking the other person what she sees. That already concedes that the world is not simply there to be looked at: what a person sees depends on the person. The question widens to everyone, to the things that bring people "to their knees," a posture that reads the same as worship and as collapse. Then the speaker does what he will go on doing. Asked what she sees, he reports what he sees in her. He answers one level up, seeing her seeing without seeing what she sees. What he sees is an expression, not an act or a doctrine. Her vision registers as expression and atmosphere, a change in a room when she enters it.

Murdoch's case of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is built so that nothing in M's conduct changes. The whole drama is in how she pictures D. The song complicates that by letting an inward change of vision show, perceptible to people who cannot enter it. "Clear" and "true" are the speaker's words for the expression, and they are also the standards of an image that is not fantasy. That is worth remembering when the last verse trades them for smoke.

"So I try to be like you
Try to feel it like you do
But without you it's no use
I can't see what you see
When I look at the world"

Trying carries the refrain and failing ends it: to be like her, to feel as she does, then the collapse into needing her. Read as a will attempting to manufacture a vision, it fails for the reason Murdoch gives against locating morality in choice. One can only choose within the world one is able to see, and seeing is itself the achievement. (She does not abolish effort. She relocates it, from the will's direct push at a feeling to the slower, oblique work of attention, and the refrain does not say which kind this is.) What the speaker wants is borrowed eyes, an exemplar whose looking might stand in for his own while his is clouded. Murdoch's Kantian man, free, independent, lonely, brave, has no room for that need. It would count as failure rather than as the ordinary way sight is learned. Yet the longing keeps bending back toward the self (I try, I can't), and self-regard is where Murdoch finds the main obstacle to attention. On its return after the second verse the same words ask for more: not to share her calm but to look at chaos without either despair or consolation.

"The words 'intelligent', 'well-intentioned', etc. are deliberately chosen to convey that the change of view should be considered as good. Murdoch explicitly asks her readers to think of the change in that way. She acknowledges that it may be very difficult to decide whether M's change of mind is proper or not 'in real life, and this is of interest'. Is it delusion or love that moves M to do so? Murdoch holds that she has created a picture where love would provide the appropriate description (Murdoch 1997: 313).

Murdoch adds specific claims 'to ensure that whatever is in question as happening happens entirely in M's mind' (Murdoch 1997: 312). The couple has moved away, or D has died. However, for the analytical philosophers at whom this argument is directed, these claims make the example irrelevant for moral philosophy. The refutation follows immediately, and Murdoch characteristically presents it as if in a dialogue. A philosopher, she suggests, can argue either that there is no inner life and since there is no change in the outer life either, it is difficult to speak of any change at all. Or, there is some..." (Altorf on the above M&D thought experiment and its connection to dialectical/analytical philosophy)

...

"When the night is someone elses
And you're trying to get some sleep
When your thoughts are too expensive
To ever want to keep
When there's all kinds of chaos
And everyone is walking lame
You don't even blink now, do you
Or even look away"

The verse moves from her face to her circumstances. It gives the song's one hint of another person's claim on her: the night belongs to someone else, so she cannot sleep. Attention is paid for in sleep. What she cannot afford to keep is her thought. That might mean grief is dear, or that she has let go of her own ruminations (the self-emptying Murdoch thinks looking requires), or that attending to others spends what thought would have hoarded. The line allows all three. The song's moral vocabulary is bodily throughout: knees, sleep, blinking, limping, and later smoke and choking. Seeing is something eyes do, which is why it can cost and why it can be obstructed.

The world arrives only as a kind, chaos of every kind, echoing the first verse's "all kinds of" things. Murdoch's attention is directed at the individual. Apart from her, the speaker's world has no individuals in it yet.

The pivot is a tag question. Her steadiness reaches us as his assertion turned to her for confirmation, which makes it his picture of her. Any reading that takes her immunity to despair as given is reading the picture as the fact. The lyric also keeps her sleepless, which sits oddly on a pedestal, and Bono has remarked that pedestals strip people of their complexity.

What is it to not blink and not look away? Murdoch's terms supply two names. As courage, the virtue she says the age of Kantian man admires, it is the sublime's posture, the will standing its ground before chaos. As attention, a patient, loving regard for a particular reality (her borrowing from Weil), it belongs to the beautiful, to looking at what is not oneself. The lyric does not separate them. From outside they look alike, and both look like the cynic, who also does not blink and whom Bono is careful to say he is not. The one detail that leans is the word "even": where the speaker has to try, she does not.

...

"So I try to be like you
Try to feel it like you do
But without you it's no use
I can't see what you see
When I look at the world

I can't wait any longer
I can't wait till I'm stronger
Can't wait any longer
To see what you see
When I look at the world"

The bridge refuses to wait, above all for strength. Strength is the Kantian currency: look when you are brave enough. Murdoch's order runs the other way. Vision comes first, and the work left for the will shrinks as vision clears. Her verdict on Kant, as Altorf records it, fits: right instinct, wrong place. The instinct is to see the world truly, and the wrong place is his own capacity. Edge, on getting older, names the danger as disappointment overwhelming the sense of the possible. Here the sense of the possible returns as impatience. The word is handed back at once, because the next verse puts him in a waiting room. Murdoch's attention is a loan from Weil, for whom waiting is attention's posture, and the speaker who cannot wait is set down where waiting is all there is.

...

"I'm in the waiting room
Can't see for the smoke
I think of you and your holy book
While the rest of us choke

Tell me, tell me, what do you see?
Tell me, tell me, what's wrong with me"

The song's most particular image arrives here, and arrives unbidden: a smoke-filled hospital waiting room that Bono says he doesn't know why he wrote, though it leads him back to being fourteen and to his parents. It is the one image he did not reach for, and the coldest. Tenderness comes in general terms, particularity in the cold, and the song rarely joins them. The opening's vocabulary inverts. Clarity becomes smoke. The atmosphere she changed by entering a room becomes the air the rest choke on. The speaker is already in the room, with only the thought of her. This is Murdoch's setup once D is made absent: whatever happens has to happen in the mind.

What happens is not generous. The expression, a face, has become a "holy book," a possession and a category in place of a particular. "The rest of us" fences her off from the night she was sharing a verse earlier. It reads as M's first thoughts about D, a classification doing the work of looking. It is also the sceptic's verdict that her vision is delusion. Murdoch concedes that the same inward change can be described as self-deception or as love and justice, and that in life we may be unable to decide. The song puts both descriptions in one voice.

The closing pair of questions returns the first verse's question, now demanded rather than asked, and adds a second about himself. Murdoch's M, having listed what may be wrong with her (prejudice, narrowness, snobbery, jealousy), says to herself, "Let me look again." The song's last two questions are that moment, compressed and outsourced: he asks the saint to do both the looking and the accusing. Whether this is the tax collector's humility, Murdoch's image of the good against the Kantian Lucifer, or the put-down turned inward, a reproach that still waits for someone else to look, the lyric does not say. Nor does Bono settle it. By his account the saint might be Ali or himself, and the voice might be his father's, looking at him. If it is even partly the father's, the song performs the imagination it describes, giving the glower a question to ask. Either way it stops where Murdoch's example turns, with the second look still to come, slow and out of sight, which a song has little room to show.

...

Sources:

U2.com
U2gigs.com
U2songs.com
U2 by U2
U2 and Philosophy: How to Decipher an Atomic Band (edited by Mark Wrathall):
“If You Want to Kiss the Sky, Better Learn How to Kneel”: Existential Christianity in U2 by MARK A. WRATHALL
What You Don’t Know, You Can Feel It Somehow”: Knowledge, Feeling, and Revelation in U2 TIMOTHY CLEVELAND
U2, Feminism, and Ethics of Care by JENNIFER MCCLINTON-TEMPLE and ABIGAIL MYERS
"The Idea of Perfection" by Iris Murdoch
"The Soverignity of Good Over Other Concepts" by Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imaging by Hannah Marije Altorf

Murdoch on BBC's In Our Time: https://youtu.be/pBG10XnxQaI?t=1696