Studio album · No. 2
October Songwriting Credits by U2
Produced by Steve Lillywhite · Engineered by Paul Thomas, Kevin Moloney
Holds writing credit on 11 of 11 tracks
Authorship Breakdown 11 / 11 documented
Scored across the 11 tracks with documented writers, by whether U2 carries a lyricist or composer credit.
Share of the 11 tracks where a band member is credited, by role.
By the Numbers
All eleven songs are credited to U2 as a group, words and music together, with no per-track writer splits and no outside writer anywhere on the record. In practice Bono supplied the lyrics, and most of them were rebuilt or invented on the spot after his briefcase of drafts vanished during the American leg of the Boy Tour in March 1981. He later described writing lines straight onto the microphone while studio time ran at 50 pounds an hour. Steve Lillywhite produced every track, as he had on Boy. Only one musician from outside the band appears at all: Vinnie Kilduff, whose uilleann pipes run through "Tomorrow".
October is U2's second album, recorded in April and then across July and August 1981 at Compass Point in Nassau and Windmill Lane in Dublin, with Steve Lillywhite producing again after Boy. Bono had lost a briefcase of in-progress lyrics backstage in Portland that March, so the band arrived for a two-month session largely unprepared and he improvised words at the microphone. What came out is U2's most openly religious record, from the Latin chorus of "Gloria" to "Tomorrow", which Bono later realised was an account of his mother's funeral.