What was the first album you ever bought? Pick your favorite song off that album.

The first album I ever bought with my own money was Achtung Baby by U2—an album that, in my opinion, remains both one of the best rock records of the 90's and one of the most successful mid-career reinventions in pop music history. My personal history with U2 is a long and formative one that I'll tell in full some other time. Today, I'll just say that my favorite song on Achtung Baby is "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)", which contains all of the things that I think make for a truly great U2 song:

1. Eno&Lanois production which complements and expands on...
2. what Edge's now-much-copied-but-absolutely-original guitar work does to fill the space around...
3. a perfectly locked in groove courtesy of Adam & Larry, over which...
4. Bono utilizes the full breathy-whisper-to-rafter-bursting-power of his vocal range (which, at this point in his career was IMMENSE).

I listened to U2 so much for so many years that I find myself going back to their records less and less at this point in my life, but this is one of the many songs in their catalogue that still makes me remember why they were the first band who I really and truly fell in love with and whose genuine impact on the course of my life is really difficult to overstate.