Songfacts®:

• "I Fall Down" is about how tangled up lovers can become with each other, often in unhealthy ways. It tells the story of Julie and John. Julie writes a letter saying that she's leaving, but each time she tries to get up, she falls. John finds the letter and demands that Julie explain herself and warns that she better not leave him. Julie just keeps falling down, and then John falls down with her. The story has no conclusion and leaves us floating there with Julie and John, falling eternally into their inertia, trapped in an emotional prison of their own making.
• The original title for the song was "When I Fall Down." It included lyrics, "When I fall down, we all down."
• The debut performance of "I Fall Down" came on April 17, 1981, when U2 played Bogart's in Cincinnati, Ohio. They kept it in their sets for the next few years but by 1985 it got squeezed out by songs from their albums War and The Unforgettable Fire. That was the last year they played it live.
• Earlier live versions of the song were rougher than the final studio version, with heavier drums and no piano.
• The band performed the song at least 15 times while touring their debut album, Boy.
• Bono had to rewrite the lyrics from memory because, on March 22, 1981, he lost a briefcase that contained them, along with various songwriting notes, at a show in Portland, Oregon. The briefcase was eventually returned to him in 2004 after being discovered in an attic in Tacoma, Washington, but its loss created a lot of trouble for U2 in recording October.