I was watching the making of U2's Unforgettable Fire album of the Slane Castle DVD and there is this part at the beginning where Bono is describing how he goes about making a new album. Rather than sit down with a pen and think of what you want the album to be about, he sort of lets it just come out. Like the song is already written in a way and the less you interfere the better.

I think this could sort of apply to BJ albums like These Days. Everyone wonders why BJ wrote a more depressing album and Jon has said it just turned out that way by accident. Do you think it turned out to be a strong album because they just made it with probably not as much care if it did well on the charts and were more laid back to the writing approach. After all, BJ was still riding high on the success of Crossroad and they probably didn't care if These Days wasn as big a success or not.

Nowadays they seem to trying too hard somehow. With Crush and Bounce its almost as if they didn't know what they wanted to write about so they came up with random ideas and made the album that way. Im not saying those albums are bad but they don't really have an ongoing theme and I don't see why they had to bring in all these new writers to help them.

Just a thought, but do you think that lately (TLFR aside) that they should take a different approach to writing their songs.