Category: Arts & Culture Key figures: Bono (vocals, lyrics), The Edge (guitar), Adam Clayton (bass), Larry Mullen Jr. (drums), Daniel Lanois (producer), Brian Eno (producer), Anton Corbijn (photographer, visual identity)
The Joshua Tree is the fifth studio album by the Irish rock band U2, released on March 9, 1987, on Island Records. Produced by Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno — who had previously collaborated with the band on The Unforgettable Fire (1984) — the album was recorded primarily at Windmill Lane Studios and Danesmoate House in Dublin from January 1986 to January 1987. Its iconic sleeve photographs were shot by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn in the Mojave Desert, California, among the eponymous Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia). The album was dedicated to Greg Carroll, U2’s New Zealand-born personal assistant, who died in a motorcycle accident in Dublin in July 1986.
Thematically, The Joshua Tree juxtaposes a fascination with American mythology, landscape, and roots music against a critique of Reagan-era foreign policy and political violence. Bono drew lyrical inspiration from visits to the United States and from the work of American authors and musicians including Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and Woody Guthrie. The album opens with “Where the Streets Have No Name,” a soaring anthem built around The Edge’s signature delay-guitar figures, followed by “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” a gospel-inflected rock song that became one of U2’s most recognisable tracks. “With or Without You,” a sparse ballad anchored by Adam Clayton’s throbbing bass and an Infinite Guitar sustain pedal built by Michael Brook, closed the album’s first side. The second side ranges from the menacing political commentary of “Bullet the Blue Sky” — inspired by Bono’s 1985 visit to El Salvador during the civil war — to the pastoral acoustic closer “Mothers of the Disappeared,” a tribute to the mothers of political prisoners in Argentina and Chile.
The Joshua Tree broke commercial records on release. In the United Kingdom, it sold 235,000 copies in its opening week — the fastest first-week UK album sale recorded to that point — and was certified platinum within 48 hours of release. It entered the UK Albums Chart at number one and remained on the chart for 201 weeks. In the United States, the album debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200 on April 4, 1987, before reaching number one three weeks later; it held that position for nine consecutive weeks and spent 120 weeks on the chart in total. It also reached number one in more than twenty countries, including Australia, Canada, Sweden, and Austria. By the end of 1987, four million copies had been shipped in the US alone. The album became the first to sell one million copies on CD in the United States.
Three singles charted prominently. “With or Without You” became U2’s first US number-one single (Billboard Hot 100) in April 1987. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” also reached number one in the US in June 1987, while peaking at number six in the UK. “Where the Streets Have No Name,” released in August, reached number four in the UK and number thirteen in the US. The album received extensive critical acclaim: Rolling Stone called it “the big one,” while Time magazine placed the band on its cover on April 27, 1987, proclaiming U2 “Rock’s Hottest Ticket” — a rare acknowledgement of a rock act’s cultural dominance in a mainstream news weekly.
The accompanying Joshua Tree Tour ran from April to December 1987 across 96 concerts in 11 countries. The North American legs, each lasting several months, established U2 as the first rock band to play stadium shows consistently and profitably on both coasts; the tour became the highest-grossing North American concert tour of 1987. It was the first time the band performed primarily in stadiums rather than arenas.
At the 30th Grammy Awards ceremony on March 2, 1988, The Joshua Tree won Album of the Year and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal — U2’s first Grammy Awards (the band would eventually accumulate 22 Grammys through 2020). “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” received nominations for Record of the Year and Song of the Year but did not win those categories.
The Joshua Tree has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. It was certified ten-times platinum in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1995 and received the diamond certification (ten million US units), and by 2023 held a ten-times platinum certification in the United Kingdom with 2.88 million copies sold. In 2014, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Recording Registry, having been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” — the first Irish recording to receive that honour. Rolling Stone ranked The Joshua Tree 26th on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in both the 2003 and 2020 editions.
The Joshua Tree marked a pivotal moment in rock history — the point at which U2 transformed from a critically respected band with a committed following into the biggest rock act in the world. Its commercial achievement demonstrated that a rock album could simultaneously occupy the summit of the album charts, generate multiple number-one singles, and win the industry’s highest award while engaging with political subject matter ranging from the US role in Central American conflicts to the grief of families destroyed by authoritarian regimes. The album’s synthesis of stadium-rock ambition with rootsy, gospel, and blues influences proved enormously influential on subsequent rock acts seeking to combine scale with substance.
The record also helped reshape the economics of the music industry in the CD era. Its status as the first album to sell one million CDs in the United States underscored the format’s growing commercial dominance over vinyl and cassette. The Joshua Tree Tour’s consistent profitability in stadium settings set a template for the touring model that would define rock economics for the following three decades.
The album arrived at a specific cultural moment — the second Reagan term, the Iran-Contra scandal, the tail end of the Cold War — and its layered treatment of an outsider’s ambivalent love for America resonated across the Atlantic world. That resonance has proven durable: a 30th-anniversary stadium tour in 2017 sold out venues across Europe and North America, confirming that The Joshua Tree retained cultural relevance across generations.