Wild Irish Rose
World Exclusive Version
Streaming   Real Audio	4 minute 20 seconds
Source	Roots of Irish Music documentary

  
Bono introduces the song by saying, "I'll to talk to you about a song Wild Irish Rose, which I started in Los Angeles and which I've tried to finish in the last day (which I'll play for you later on).  But that is an attempt to tell a story in a song.  Normally, we keep pictures, I think, to tell stories -- image to image."  
 
"This is based on a time I spent in a hotel called The Million Dollar Hotel in Los Angeles, which is downtown Los Angeles.  It's like a half-way house/hotel for bums and people thrown out of hospitals. And I was being taken through this hotel, I was doing some filming down there and I noticed that the cheap liquor that all the bums drank was called Wild Irish Rose. So I started with the line 'the city of Angels, has brought a devil out in me.' And developed it on from there.  The rose in Ireland, as you know, is a romantic image of love obviously, but it's also an image of Ireland itself.  And that is an image that would probably be nice to subvert."  
 

WILD IRISH ROSE  

In a field by a river  
My lover and I did lie  
And on my naked shoulder  
She's too proud to cry  
She said that I must leave her  
An icy tear she froze  
How could I melt the heart  
Of a wild Irish rose?  

Well a gypsy she has made of me  
A servent of the street  
From bed to bed I've traveled  
To taste a love as sweet  
Well the heart it knows no reasons  
And reason never knows...  
As I lie with them, I'm thinkin' of  
A wild Irish rose  

Well I saw the city of angels  
It brought a devil out of me  
In Hell's Hotel on Sunset  
Showed a whore no mercy  
As the orange sky was screamin'  
From the roof I let her go  
These are the dizzy heights that brought me  
My wild Irish rose  

Well red is the rose  
That she laid on my grave  
A life is what she wanted  
And a life I surely gave  
Like a hundred men before me  
They lay lyin' here in rows  
Young men, bloody  
As a wild Irish rose