1,298 songs in, and we reach the first U2 song. It’ll be the only one, though, sorry. There are people out there who despise the band, mostly because they don’t like Bono. Me? I don’t have anything massive against them. I’m neither here nor there. I can’t say I’m the biggest fan. But they do have some fine, fine songs. When I really started getting into alternative/rock music in about 2004, it was during a time when the video for ‘Vertigo’ was playing almost every day on MTV2. The How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb era. And nine-year-old me thought it was a cool song. So I can sort of thank U2 for getting me into the genre a little more. But today’s song isn’t from that era of the band. It’s from the one that preceded it a good four years earlier. In 2000, U2 returned from an experimental phase during the ’90s with a back-to-basics rock album in All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and ‘Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of’ – the second song on there – was released as its second single in 2001.

And this is one of those occasions where I have a clear, clear memory of seeing its music video on TV during that time, even though I would have only been five years old. It was playing on The Box, which was kinda the mainstream UK pop music video channel of the time, and there was Bono on the TV screen rolling around on the floor over and over again. And because I was a child and still had years until my voice dropped, whenever I tried to sing, “Stuck in a moment and you can’t get out of it,” that “can’t get out of it” part was too low for my register. I didn’t have the diaphragm for it yet. For the longest time, in the back of my mind, I thought that if I was able to sing that phrase, it must have meant that the process of puberty had finally happened. I can gladly say at the age of 30, I can sing along to the track just fine. It wasn’t until a few years back that I revisited the song, gave it a few more listens with that core memory flashing in the brain and realized that I liked it a bunch.

Think it’s common knowledge that the track was written as a tribute to Michael Hutchence, a good friend of Bono’s, who was famously known for being the original lead singer for the rock band INXS. Hutchence passed away in 1997 through suicide, the action of which is kind of alluded to by Bono in the song’s bridge (“I was unconscious, half asleep” / “I wasn’t jumping, for me it was a fall” / “It’s a long way down to nothing at all”). Bono, saddened by what happened, wrote ‘Stuck in a Moment…’ as a things-he-wished-he-could-have-said song. He expresses his admiration for Hutchence and is still effected by him even with absence, but wishes he could have told him that whatever tough times he was going through, they would eventually pass and there was no need to feel so down. Guitarist The Edge also gets a moment on the lead vocal near the song’s end with the falsetto on the “And if the night runs over…” section. Though funnily, it gets pushed back into the mix to make way for Bono’s adlibbing. I like this one a lot. A track that reminds you to reach out to your friends in times of trouble. Or just on a frequent basis. ‘Cause you never know what could be happening.