Upon the turning of the year, besides looking back– sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with regret – at the year that has passed, people are usually inclined to look towards the new year with a renewed sense of optimism. But as the world blindly staggers into 2008 burdened by seemingly intractable conflicts and the ever-lingering awareness that humanity as it stands is pretty much fucking up the planet ecologically, it is hard to be optimistic. And yet life without hope or optimism would be unbearable.

Although it is a predictable choice for this time of year, “New Year’s Day” by U2, and found on 1983s War, seems to be performing a high wire act. Caught between hope and despair, “New Year’s Day,” in the words of Saint Bono, is about “the struggle for love.” The song was originally penned as a love song for his wife, but world events of the early 80s, particularly that of Poland’s Solidarity movement, infiltrate “New Year’s Day” and turn it into a protest or antiwar song as well.

Driven by Adam Clayton’s now distinctive bass line and Edge’s piano, the sound of “New Year’s Day” is both urgent and stirring. As if amplifying the already compelling nature of the song, Larry Mullen’s drums add a distinctive martial beat while Bono’s vocals soar over the music, which is laid down like an army on parade.

Perhaps reflecting the destruction wrought by war, love in “New Year’s Day,” as is usually the case with Bono’s writing, is attended by darkness and loss: “Under a blood red sky/A crowd has gathered in black and white/Arms entwined, the chosen few/The newspapers says/Say it’s true it’s true/And we can break through/Though torn in two/We can be one.” Certainly the music and lyrics of the song convey a sense of darkness, and it seems that most people would be hard-pressed to call “New Year’s Day” optimistic. Indeed, the song teeters around the abyss of violence with the central image of, presumably, two people being torn from one another. However, the alternating arrangement of the words “I will be with you again,” for “I will begin again” in the chorus, although caught in the mournful quality of the music, can really be only understood as the attempt to see the world in a more hopeful light.

In spite of the horrors implied by “New Year’s Day,” the song seems to be more of an acknowledgement of suffering than be voicing an outright disappointment with humanity. Rather than be mired in darkness “New Year’s Day” looks toward the light, however dim it may be.

Happy New Year everybody.