Watch: New U2 video for ‘Ordinary Love’ from Mandela biopic

U2 has just released its first new song in four years, “Ordinary Love,” which premiered on the group’s Facebook page.

The track was composed and recorded for the soundtrack of “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” the biopic about activist and former South African President Nelson Mandela slated to open in limited release on Nov. 29 before expanding to more theaters in the U.S. and Canada on Christmas Day.

The video by Oliver Jeffers and Mac Premo is a dazzling stream of images through which the song’s lyrics are written in longhand across each scene.

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The song, which will appear on the film’s soundtrack but not on the new U2 studio album due next year, opens with spare instrumentation, just chords on electric piano under singer Bono’s voice before the full band kicks in after the first verse with a pulsing rock backbeat and reverberating guitars.

Toward the end, there’s a quick vignette of a letter from which many words have been cut out in a way that reflects how letters to and from prisoners are often censored.

The song’s chorus:

We can’t fall any further

If we can’t feel ordinary love

And we can’t reach any higher

If we can’t deal with ordinary love

Here’s a link to U2’s Facebook page and the “Ordinary Love” video.

Post by U2.

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Follow Randy Lewis on Twitter: @RandyLewis2

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