The album cover is built around an airport sign that reads J33-3. On October 30, 2000, U2, the Irish rock band, released All That You Can't Leave Behind, their tenth studio album. It arrived after a long run of 1990s experiments that had carried the group far from the more traditional sound they had built their name on. The title itself was a kind of statement: after all the detours, there was something they were refusing to leave behind.
Back to Eno and Lanois
The answer lay in the way the record was made. After those experiments, U2 wanted to return to a more traditional sound, and they went back to the producers who knew them best, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. The pair had already made three albums with the band. Eno pushed U2 to write songs in the studio rather than showing up with finished material. The group played as a band in a room, a reaction against the layered production of the previous decade. That decision became the engine of the album.
The group-in-a-room method changed how songs appeared. The song "New York," for example, started when Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois experimented with a drum loop recorded by U2's drummer. The band chased a leaner, more minimal sound, with each part having to hold up in the room. It was a sharp turn from the layered experiments of the previous decade. The studio was no longer a place to pile on sounds; it became the room where the musicians had to face each other.
The studio was no longer a place to pile on sounds; it became the room where the musicians had to face each other.
A stolen laptop in Dublin
The work was not without real-world disruptions. During the sessions, a bag holding personal papers and a laptop with lyric files was stolen from Bono's car near the Clarence hotel in Dublin. Bono offered a reward of 2,000 pounds. The laptop came back after an Irish buyer paid 300 pounds and recognized a photograph of Bono's son Elijah Hewson on the screen. The return kept a set of unfinished words inside the project at a moment when losing them could have stalled the album.
The clearest argument for the new-old approach came from a guitar part. While recording "Beautiful Day," the Edge used a guitar tone he had rarely touched since War in 1983. A disagreement broke out over that sound. The Edge insisted, and the tone stayed in the finished version of the song. The lead single, "Beautiful Day," topped the United Kingdom chart, giving the band another chart-topper.
The J33-3 cover sign
The cover photograph made the same point in visual form. The original airport sign showed F21-36, but at U2's request designers changed it to J33-3, a reference to the Bible verse Jeremiah 33:3. Bono referred to the sign as God's phone number. It was a strange, small act of rewriting, hidden in plain sight on the front of a major album.
The album connected quickly. Reviews were mostly positive, and Metacritic's average stands at 79 out of 100 from 17 reviews. All That You Can't Leave Behind topped the charts in 32 countries. It sold more than 12 million copies. Coming after a period when the band's direction had divided listeners, that scale felt like vindication.
That run brought the band a handful of Grammy Awards. All That You Can't Leave Behind became the only album in history whose separate tracks won the Record of the Year Grammy: "Beautiful Day" in 2001 and "Walk On" in 2002. By the time "Walk On" won, it had taken on a new meaning after the terrorist attacks in 2001. The cover still points to J33-3, the sign Bono called God's phone number.