Songfacts®:

• U2 songs cover the spectrum when it comes to love, with some about its pure joy ("Two Hearts Beat As One") and others about the opposing forces it can develop into ("With Or Without You"). "Love Is Blindness" is in the latter category, a song where lead singer Bono is trying to make sense of a powerful romance that has been torn asunder.
  
  Bono hadn't had his heart broken since he was an adolescent (he started dating his wife Ali when he was a teenager) but by this point he had learned to capture those emotions in his lyrics, often drawing on those around him or on characters from books and movies.
• When U2 recorded this song, guitarist the Edge was going through a divorce. As Bono tells it in his memoir Surrender, his searing guitar section in this song was his means of expressing his pain.
  
  "It is a story he must tell, but a story he can never tell with words," Bono wrote. "A story too painful even to tell himself. The story is about his marriage, which is over, and how he is splitting up with the mother of his kids, these three girls whom he loves more than life."
  
  "It's as if he's taking out all this pent-up rage and grief and sadness on this guitar," he continued. "Fighting with his feelings by punishing the guitar in his hands, smacking it, trying to rip strings off it."
• "Love Is Blindness" is the last song on U2's seventh album, Achtung Baby. It's the album that nearly broke up the band; after rising quickly to become one of the biggest bands in the world, they suddenly found it very difficult to make music together. They pulled through it with moments of clarity and inspiration in the studio, particularly the song "One." "Love Is Blindness" is another when the creative block abated and the tension turned into inspiration.
  
  It got a lot better when they toured for the album in 1992 (the Zoo TV Tour). A dancer on the tour, Morleigh Steinberg, ended up becoming the Edge's second wife.
• "Love Is Blindness" was the last song in the setlist on U2's Zoo TV Tour, a massive spectacle that ran for almost two years. The stage show was intentionally overstimulated, a parody of attention-hogging media and rock star excess. By closing it out with "Love Is Blindness," they left on a sincere note.
• Bono weaved the breakdown of The Edge's first marriage into the lyrical themes of Achtung Baby. "There is one great anecdote that I think it explains the difference between music and emotional intensity," The Edge told Mojo magazine. "I was doing the guitar solo for 'Love Is Blindness,' this cathartic moment to let it all happen through my guitar. I played what I thought was this crazy, emotionally driven solo. Afterwards, Danny [Lanois, co-producer] came on the intercom and said, 'Yeah, Edge that was good, but I think you could do it better. Could you try again?' The solo I ended up playing expressed way better what I was wanting to say. But it had to be done in a cold, dispassionate frame of mind. If you let your emotions absolutely take over it's not gonna work."