Cedars Of Lebanon

On No Line on the Horizon, Bono wrote songs with characters in mind. This atmospheric ballad was penned from the point of view of a war correspondent. Bono told Q magazine February 2009 that "I meet a lot of them of course in my other life." He added: "I'm sick of me. I'm sick of Bono and I am him. That might be glib. But as an artist I felt it was a little limiting to be in the first person, so I allowed myself just to wear the clothes of characters that wandered in my imagination."
He added: "The guy in 'Cedars of Lebanon' is a war correspondent. I meet a lot of them in my other life. And I have a lot of empathy because I'd probably be one."

The song (and the album) closes with the lyric: "Choose you enemies carefully, 'cause they will define you/ Make then interesting, because in some ways they will mind you/ They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends/ Gonna last longer with you than your friends." The Observer Music Monthly February 2009 asked Bono if he was singing the lines from experience. He replied: "In a way, I guess. I think one of the things that has set our band apart is the fact that we chose interesting enemies. We didn't choose the obvious enemies - The Man, the establishment. We didn't buy into that. Our credo was: no them, there's only us. Think about it. Every other band was us and them. The Clash, our great heroes. Then U2 arrived and it was no them, only us."

This features a sample of "Against the Sky" by the ambient musicians Harold Budd and Brian Eno. It can be found on their 1984 album, Pearl. Brian Eno co-produced the No Line on The Horizon, though Daniel Lanois is the accredited producer of this track.