It was March 9, 1987 when U2 released The Joshua Tree. It was their fifth studio album and went on to be their most successful album, selling over 10 million copies in America alone. This is ironic since the album is half anti-American and half personal.

Bullet the Blue Sky is a scathing attack on America's foreign policy with El Salvador's right wing goverment. Larry Mullen Jr. creates a martial drum beat while Adam Clayton weaves a thundering bassline. Mixed together they create an ominous tone. But it is The Edge's guitar that creates an auditory image of falling bombs and scared Salvadorians running for their lives.

Mothers of the Disappeared is a lament for the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires Argentina. These mothers of thousands of los desaparecidos (the disappeared) whose sons opposed the military government of Videla and Galtieri in Argentina. They were kidnapped and never seen again. The mothers silently wait for the return of their sons in the Plaza holding signs and pictures of their sons.

Besides the overtly political nature of the album it is also very personal for the band. One Tree Hill is an elegy for Greg Carroll, Bono's personal assistant and friend who died in 1986 and who the album is dedicated. I Still Haven't Found What I Am Looking For is Bono's inner struggles with faith and temptation. While Running To Stand Still is a rustic ballad about heroin addiction.

The theme of America runs throughout the album. Whether it is analogizing the duality of the American spirit and it’s usually ruthless foreign policy, or it’s rustic, picturesque landscape, which the band used as a backdrop for the album. The cover image was taken in Death Valley California and explains one of the themes shared throughout the album: water and desert.

Brian Eno, producer of the album, told the band to imagine they were in the American Southwest, which Bono said provided the band with "a canvas on which to paint." Lyrically there are 46 references to the words rain, raining, rainin' rainfall, flood, water, sea, ocean, and river. There are 17 references to desert, dry, plain, heat, dust, sunlight, and sun. The images represent poetic equivalents of life and death, loss and redemption, and other diametrically opposed, but uniquely linked forces.

At the smallest level the album deals with reconciling the death of Bono’s close friend Greg Carroll. At a larger level, the album both implicitly and explicitly praises and criticizes America as an idea and a tyrant. At the largest level, the album can be seen as a meditation on loss and redemption. Any way you look at it, it all adds up to The Joshua Tree being one of the greatest albums ever made and cements U2 as one of the greatest bands of all time.