One-on-One With U2

March 8, 2009— -- Full disclosure time. I cannot be fully impartial about U2. When I was a freshman in college -- back in the days before Ticketmaster and clicking "refresh" online could score you great seats to a show -- I once slept overnight in a freezing parking garage with my friend Monica to get tickets for the Joshua Tree tour. When I told Bono that story Friday, he leaned in and asked "where?" as if he might remember the moment. Syracuse, N.Y., fall 1987.

Bono has a way of making you feel like you are the center of his universe, if only for 10 minutes in a stairwell. He is just as cool as you'd imagine he'd be in person.

Like a true politician, he greeted me with a "Good to see you again!" even though we'd met only once before, and that interview was remote via satellite. No matter. There's an instant collegiality — feigned or not, I didn't care. He's your old buddy just catching up to chat a bit about the new album.

He and Adam Clayton, who joined us in the hallway of a classroom building on Fordham University's campus just after their big blowout performance Friday on "Good Morning America," kept joking about having never gone to college.

"Adam was thrown out of school," Bono teased.

"Coming to America was our college," Clayton chimed in. "We came here when we were 19 and 20 and we got to know a lot of people who went to college."

Four kids from Dublin, who got together after Larry Mullen Jr., the band's drummer, posted a wanted ad up at their prep school. Whatever you think of their music, it is striking that they've endured for so long. Rock bands are supposed to argue and fight and break up, right?

"We still argue from time to time…" Clayton said, sitting in that stairwell. "But we're getting better at playing together." Wait, what? Getting better at playing together? After 30 years there's still a learning curve?

"It's one long argument being in U2, is my memory of it" Bono told me. Was he joking? I think so. But there is clearly an unwritten pact between these guys. Somewhere along the way, someone (Bono?) must have realized they had a good thing going, and they better not mess it up.