In the rain we see their tears

U2 - 'Mothers Of The Disappeared' (The Joshua Tree - 1987)

Island Records set U2 a deadline of 15 January 1987 to complete their full follow-up to The Unforgettable Fire, and the band had yet to agree on the track order as the clock was ticking away. At this point, an unexpected source of inspiration helped them in that eleventh hour. One of the album’s mixers, Steve Lillywhite, was married to singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl and she volunteered to sequence the record. She didn’t have a completely free hand; the band told her that “Where The Streets Have No Name” was first and “Mothers of the Disappeared” went last.

“Mothers of the Disappeared was written on Bono’s mother-in-law’s Spanish guitar, and the melody was inspired by a piece he composed in Ethiopia in 1985. This would have been right after the summer’s Live Aid concerts as Bono began a journey that would stretch out across five decades of humanitarian concern before the regular meetings with presidents and prime ministers we see him attend now.

Bono will often explain when U2 perform this song what it is about. While the melody was crafted in Africa, the words are borne out of Central and South America. In the middle of the 1980s, the civil war was raging in El Salvador, and Bono travelled to San Salvador. While he was in the country, he met the CoMadres, women whose children had been whisked away by night squads. This type of ‘forced disappearance’ was commonplace across Central and South America. Some of those taken away by the ruling parties were thrown into prisons and forgotten about until regime change; some were killed. In Argentina, the junta were renowned for drugging their captives and throwing them out of aircraft alive over the Atlantic. The CoMadres were also known as “The Mothers of the Disappeared" elsewhere in countries impacted by American backed proxy wars.

Bono then stayed with a group of guerrillas in the middle of the mountains in the country’s north, where he was inspired to write "Bullet The Blue Sky," another song from The Joshua Tree album in which Bono implored The Edge to “put El Salvador through an amplifier.”

Adam Clayton told Mojo in 2017;

It's kind of ominous, But there's an optimism in the melody that we can survive these dark forces, as well as an acknowledgement that those dark forces are demonic in these situations.

The Joshua Tree was the band’s second album with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois; Lanois had just finished off Peter Gabriel’s So the previous year, so was a highly sought after producer going into the sessions and with the success of the album, he’s soon be producing Dylan, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris.

Recalling his memories of the tune on the album's 20th-anniversary box set, Bono noted:

"I remember [Daniel Lanois] when we were finishing 'Mothers of the Disappeared,' losing his mind and performing at the mixing desk like he was Mozart at the piano, head blown back in an imaginary breeze, and it was pouring down with rain outside the studio, and I was singing about how 'in the rain we see their tears,' the tears of those who have been disappeared. And when you listen to that mix, you can actually hear the rain outside. It was magical, really."

The Joshua Tree is, at its heart, a schizophrenic album when it comes to its subject matter, America. There is the criticism of the Reagan Presidency and the way the US foreign policy of the time was home to as many contradictions as failures - which included backing many of the regimes responsible for these ‘forced disappearances. The band explores a deep fascination and reverence for America on other tracks. Sound-tracking the wide-open, cinematic vistas and landscapes. This contradiction between the myth of America and the reality of America is what almost led to the album being called The Two Americas.

In 1998, U2 played in Chile with The Mothers of the Disappeared onstage with pictures of their missing children. After, the women hung scarves on Bono's neck. The band had not played the song live since 1987, and Bono used the opportunity to ask former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, to reveal to the Madres the locations of their children's bodies.

U2 may have spent the years following The Joshua Tree trying to hug that sound closer (Rattle and Hum) and put distance between themselves and it (most of the 1990s), but they eventually came back to it in the 2000s. In this song, the Bono you hear, the social justice warrior, hasn’t strayed from that role ever since.