First off, I've been informed that I got quoted in the
Post-Dispatch recently. They've been getting people to vote for the "Seven Wonders of St. Louis"--can you guess what I nominated?
Now here's a few U2-related links.
This first one is a piece about Soul at Work, which is a cool book even above and beyond the fact that it begins with an interview with The Edge, but you know what? I probably wouldn't have heard about it without that interview. And it's a fair guess I wouldn't have gotten a chance to talk to the author, Margaret Benefiel, without the U2 connection, either.
Next is an interview with Bill Flanagan. For those of you who don't know, Flanagan is a writer-hero of mine, and certainly the one person who has done the most to make me a rabid U2 fanatic through his book U2 at the End of the World. I cannot say enough good things about his writing style, his attention to detail, his gift for making connections across a variety of fields. His book shed light not only on a rock tour, but on the state of the world at large in those very early days of the nineties. Anyhow--it was great to get to talk with him, one of the highlights of what I'll call my career.
Soon after that interview, I gave up my "professional U2 fandom" with @U2. PlaybackSTL gave me a chance to look back on it as part of a feature they are going to start having regularly called "First Person." All the essays under this heading will have something to do with an effect the arts have on someone's life. @U2 has certainly had an effect on my life, so it seemed only right to delve into the subject.
One more. You may have heard Bono spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast this year. Jay Swartzendruber, editor at CCM Magazine, writes about it here. I'm linking this piece because I think it's very, very cool how he links to a couple of my @U2 pieces at the end. (He was a key source for that Nashville Summit article.)