Slug (song)

Slug (song)

“Slug” is a song by Passengers, a side project of rock band U2 and musician Brian Eno. It is the second track on Passengers’ only release, the 1995 album Original Soundtracks 1. Lyrically, it is a portrait of a desolate soul during a time of celebration. The instrumentation is intended to represent the lights turning on in a city at night.

About Slug (song) in brief

Summary Slug (song)“Slug” is a song by Passengers, a side project of rock band U2 and musician Brian Eno. It is the second track on Passengers’ only release, the 1995 album Original Soundtracks 1. The track was originally titled “Seibu” and was almost left off the album. It was rediscovered later during the recording sessions. Lyrically, it is a portrait of a desolate soul during a time of celebration. The instrumentation is intended to represent the lights turning on in a city at night. The group primarily drew inspiration for the song from U2’s experiences in Tokyo at the conclusion of the Zoo TV Tour. Four of the fourteen tracks on the album are associated with real films, while the other four are written by Eno for fictional films. The album was released with the title “Passengers” on 7 November 1995, as the Passengers album 1; it is out of the 14 tracks on Original Soundtrack 1, which are written as soundtrack music, each of which is associated with a specific film in the album’s liner notes.

The band intended to record a soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film The Pillow Book. Although the plan did not come to fruition, Eno suggested they continue recording music suitable for film soundtracks, as Eno did with his Music for Films album series. U2 spent time in Shinjuku, Tokyo, at the end of the zoo TV Tour in 1993. The vivid colours of the street signs and billboards reminded them of the set of the 1982 science-fiction film Blade Runner, so the band tried to create visual music when recording. Bono felt the visual suggestion from the music was more important than the story told by the lyrics. The song was written to create the visual of lights turning onto a city like Tokyo, beginning with opening notes resembling Christmas lights.