U2 Song: "When Love Comes To Town"

When Love Comes to Town is one of U2’s more explicitly Christian songs. Recorded with B.B. King for Rattle and Hum, the song carries the soul of a blues testimony. It is a confession of guilt, grace, and transformation. It tells the story of a man who has lived through moral wreckage and personal failure, but who has been rescued by the arrival of a love that is far more than emotion. This is divine love: the kind that saves.

The opening verse begins in lostness. “I was a sailor, I was lost at sea,” Bono sings, “I was under the waves before love rescued me.” It’s the language of a drowning soul, echoing the psalms of lament and the desperate cry of one who cannot save himself. The sea, in Scripture, often symbolizes chaos and death. To be lost beneath it is to be overwhelmed by sin and despair. Yet the turning point comes when love arrives, when grace finds him in the deep.

The song moves through a series of vignettes, each one showing a man chasing life and pleasure without love. There’s a broken promise beneath a red sunset, a forgotten wedding vow, a night lost in music and regret. This isn’t a tidy confession but an honest one. The singer does not excuse himself. “Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down,” he admits, “but I did what I did before love came to town.” That refrain is not self-pity; it’s repentance. It marks the difference between a life lived in ignorance and one transformed by grace.

Then, suddenly, the song steps onto holy ground. “I was there when they crucified my Lord,” King sings, his voice rough with humility. “I threw the dice when they pierced His side.” In that moment, the confession becomes universal. It’s no longer just one man’s story. It’s humanity’s story. We are all present at the cross, complicit in the suffering of Christ, guilty by association and by our own sin. Yet the verse does not end in despair. “I’ve seen love conquer the great divide.” The cross, the very place of judgment, becomes the bridge of reconciliation.

“When love comes to town” becomes the refrain of salvation. Love is not a passing emotion or a fleeting feeling but a visitation. It is a coming of God into the broken streets of human life. It is incarnation. It arrives like a train and burns like a flame. When it comes it exposes sin, heals shame, and awakens joy. The singer’s confession turns into praise because the one who was lost has been found.

In the end, When Love Comes to Town is both a blues song and a gospel. It testifies that love has a name, and that name is Christ. When He comes, everything changes.