Trip Through Your Wires

Many of the songs on The Joshua Tree were created to go together. Without the counterpart song(s), these songs didn't truly make sense. Trip Through Your Wires was one of these songs, which was counter-balanced by Sweetest Thing, which didn't make it to the final album (though it was later released as a b-side). Ironically it it Sweetest Thing which is now the better known U2 song, with Trip Through Your Wires never performed live following the conclusion of The Joshua Tree tour in 1987 (O'Hare, 2007).

Both Wires and Sweetest Thing are about love, but whilst Sweetest Thing is about being apologetic, Wires is very much about being enticed. Both songs were musically based on American music styles (blues for Wires and R&B for Sweetest Thing). The video above is of the band performing a raw and unprocessed version of the song for the first time above, on Dublin's RTE TV program in 1986 is much more blues than the recorded version on the album. The song is about a girl who evokes tremendous passion in a guy. The title is a play on "Trip Wire," which is a low-placed wire that often sets off a trap. Bono sings about being caught up in all her "wires." Neil Stokes, who wrote the book Into The Heart: The Stories Behind Every U2 Song describes it as, “a possible paean to the contradictory charms of America personified as a woman” (Stokes, 2005).