The Joshua Tree by U2 (1987), № 44 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno turn U2 into a band that sounds like the desert it's named after. Recorded in a Co. Wicklow mansion with a pipe organ they couldn't tune.
U2's fifth album. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois co-producing. Released March 9, 1987. The album that made U2 the biggest band in the world.
U2's fifth album. Recorded at Danesmoate House, Melbeach, and STS Studios in Dublin across summer 1986. The album that took U2 from a major band to the biggest band in the world.
By 1986, U2, Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr., had become one of the biggest bands in Europe and a major US act after The Unforgettable Fire (1984). The Joshua Tree was their fifth album and their second with Eno and Lanois as co-producers.
Recording took place primarily at Danesmoate House (a Georgian mansion outside Dublin) and at Melbeach (Edge's home studio) across summer 1986. The album's sound combines U2's anthemic stadium-rock with Eno and Lanois's atmospheric textures.
The album's American imagery, the title's reference to the Joshua tree of the American Southwest, the cover's Anton Corbijn desert photographs, was deliberate. Bono had been listening obsessively to American gospel, country, and blues. The album represents U2's engagement with America as both subject and aesthetic.
The album's eleven songs include 'Where the Streets Have No Name,' 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,' 'With or Without You,' 'Bullet the Blue Sky,' 'Running to Stand Still,' 'Red Hill Mining Town,' 'In God's Country,' 'Trip Through Your Wires,' 'One Tree Hill,' 'Exit,' 'Mothers of the Disappeared.'
The Joshua Tree belongs at number forty-four because it is the album that made U2 the biggest band in the world. It produced three #1 singles and won the Grammy Album of the Year.
The 1987 UK first pressing is on Island, catalog U26, in a gatefold sleeve with gold title labels and a double-page lyric/info insert. The earliest back covers carry only eight lines of 'Thanks to' text, with no 'Special thanks' line and no asterisk after 'Red Hill Mining Town' — the most reliable first-press tell. Discs were mastered at The Town House, London, with UK first copies noted as Town House DMM in the deadwax. Both EMI and PRS Ltd. pressing-plant variants of U26 exist.
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