Bono casually mentions “Cleanin’ Out My Closet” to illustrate his point and gives props to “Lose Yourself” that snatched an Oscar U2 were going after.
The big piece in Variety touched on Bono voicing a lion on “Sing 2”, being nominated for Oscar for the third time, giving up humility and looking back.
The latter topic prompted the U2 singer to mention one of Marshall’s hits as an epitome of musing over the past:
Bono: The last two albums, “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience,” broke a rule of ours, which was to keep looking forward and keep going, to not stop or look back and turn into a pillar of salt. (But) opening up to questioning why you do things, and about how you grew up and why you ended up where you ended up and all of those kinds of questions, once I opened that door, I couldn’t close it. And there was a lot for me to look at. Was it Eminem who talked about tidying his room [laughs] — “Cleanin’ Out My Closet”? That’s just an amazing song. Yeah, it was a bit of tidying of the room.
Discussing the band’s prospects of finally bagging the Oscar (“Your Song Saved My Life” from “Sing 2” is shortlisted in the Oscars’ best original song preliminary voting), Bono remembers how he felt the magnitude of Eminem’s anthem nominated in the same category.
Bono: I will say, (losing to) Eminem (in 2002, when U2 was nominated for a song from “Gangs of New York”), I have to be honest, that song, “Lose Yourself,” we were sitting there — he wasn’t even there — and it’s really an extraordinary song. I still had a tiny bit of humble, and there was a part of me there that was going, “Mmm. This will be hard. To win against that could backfire.”
Read the interview in full on the Variety wensite.
