Universal truths from U2

U2’s “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” which won best song Wednesday, is a more complex and, ultimately, satisfying number than its soaring “Beautiful Day,” which won in the same category in 2000. In fact, it is perhaps the group’s most thoughtful work since “One” more than a decade ago.

The centerpiece number on an album, “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb,” that explores epic questions of family and faith, “Sometimes” grew out of Bono’s attempts to mend strained relations with his dying father. The singer even flew home after shows on the quartet’s 2001 European concert tour to be by his father’s bedside in the final days before his death from cancer.

In “Sometimes,” Bono starts writing about his father, but he ends up writing about, as he explained in a Rolling Stone interview, his “own selfish sense of abandonment: ‘Don’t leave me here alone / Sometimes you can’t make it on your own.’ That’s me confessing to him something I never did -- that I needed him.”

“Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own,” U2

And it’s you when I look in the mirror

And it’s you that makes it hard to let go

Sometimes you can’t make it on your own.

-- Robert Hilburn