BONO has revealed how a serious health scare last year change the direction of the band's new album.
In an interview with Rolling Stone the band's guitarist The Edge explained how the major scare saw their latest album Songs of Experience take a different turn.
Speaking to the magazine he said: "He (Bono) had a brush with mortality. He definitely had a serious moment, which caused him to reflect on a lot of things."
While the band has not commented on exactly what happened, Bono himself had this to say: "I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt.
"So a lot of the songs are kind of letters – letters to [my wife] Ali, letters to my sons and daughters."
The Edge said Bono's health scare was a big influenced on the lyrical direction and where he ended up.
"It was sort of taken from a Brendan Kennelly quote," he told Rolling Stone. "He's an Irish poet and he once said to us as a piece of advice that he always found it useful to write as if you were dead.
"The inference is that it frees you of having to justify later or be delicate or be anything other than a pure expression of your essence and what's crucial to you."
The Edge and Bono on stage during the U2 iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE tour (Picture: Kevin Mazur/WireImage)He added: "Bono held onto that quote, that idea, and he wrote a lot of these lyrics as letters to certain people that are very important people in his life, the U2 fans being some and his family being others, friends, whoever.
"These became like a series of letters in the back of his mind."
In 2015 Bono also found himself meditating on death and slowing down his life since after he suffered injuries in a bike accident.
He sustained multiple fractures to his arm, hand, face and shoulder when he crashed his bicycle in New York’s Central Park in November 2014.
Speaking a few months after the accidnet the Irish singer said he has since been warned by wife Ali Hewson to change his lifestyle.
“I guess that’s going to have to stop.”
