I remember exactly where I was the first time the world changed for me. My friends and I were walking along 57th Street on a brisk night in the winter of 1993. A few rounds at Tommy Makem’s had us discussing things Irish, namely the still-recent U2 album Achtung Baby. To a man, they all loved it.

That’s when I felt the ground start to slide beneath my boots.

Up until that point, everything had been in order. U2 was a known and loved quantity. I’d been listening to the radio when the WPLJ deejay introduced a new group out of Dublin then dropped the needle on the opening song of their debut album, Boy: “I Will Follow.” Simple but fiercely urgent, its pendulum melody punctuated by double tattoos on the snare drum grabbed me by my iron-on Led Zeppelin t-shirt, pushed me against the wall, and said: “Now, here’s something new, different, and good.” I was immediately on board with this band whose name was a Cold War reference to a spy plane still flying missions, scraping the outer edge of space as it took pictures of Soviet missile silos or a bird atop the back of a water buffalo in China.

Their subsequent releases—October, War, The Unforgettable Fire, and The Joshua Tree—just got better and better. The Joshua Tree, released in March 1987, the same month I turned 20, was a monster album by any measure. That summer yielded many personal milestones; through it all, it seemed the album was literally everywhere, an omnipresent soundtrack pouring out of pizza parlors, spilling over balconies, or Dopplering into the distance as Camaros, Monte Carlos, and Honda Civics sped past.

I have a vision of driving home with my friends from the beach at West End 2 one August afternoon, all the windows down, and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” rattling the cheap stock speakers of my dad’s Chevy Malibu. We might as well have been U2 ourselves, so blissed, so blessedly transcendent did we feel, motoring directly into the sunset with our Ray-Bans earning their keep and the hot breeze tossing our brine-washed hair in every direction.

“Where the Streets Have No Names,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and “With or Without You”—the first three songs of Side 1—saturated the airwaves and they weren’t even my favorite songs on the record. To me, the Dublin lads achieved achingly transcendent beauty in the opening triple shot of Side 2: “Red Hill Mining Town,” “In God’s Country,” and “Trip Through Your Wires.” Of the three, “In God’s Country” epitomizes the feverishly romantic pitch U2 attained. The unique, unmistakeable attack of U2’s guitarist the Edge washes over you. No, more than that: it ravishes you. Bono Vox delivers his haunting poetics with relentless vocal passion. Zenith and apotheosis.

“I Will Follow” and “Into the Heart” on Boy; “Gloria” on October; “Two Hearts Beat as One” on War; “Wire” and the title track of The Unforgettable Fire; that Side 2 triptych of The Joshua Tree—these are my favorite U2 songs.

There’s a pattern there. Listen to them and you’ll understand.

Then, in what seemed a blink, I’m in on the other side of what I thought would be my career as an infantry officer in the Army. I’m back in my native New York but not the familiar haunts of Long Island. I’m scraping by in the Big Smoke itself, Manhattan. And one night, me and my friends—the same ones who sat atop damp towels in my dad’s Malibu as we rode home from the beach on the rollercoaster of the Southern State Parkway—are walking along 57th Street.

I thought U2 had made some of the record as a gag. The song “Even Better Than the Real Thing” seemed like they were slyly courting the big soda rivals for commercial deals, perhaps hoping for a bidding war: would Coca-Cola prevail and run ads with a soundbite of it’s the real thing or would Pepsi throw down bigger bucks so the public could hear U2 proclaim even better than the real thing?

And then there was “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?” Really now, a Rock song about wild horses—hmm, where had I heard that motif before?

I took philosophical umbrage with Bono’s lines in “Until the End of the World” when he sings: “I took the money / I spiked your drink / You miss too much these days if you stop to think.” Somehow that closing quip rankled; I wanted to call Bono out: “You don’t believe that for a second! You’re a poet, it’s your job to think!” If he was being sarcastic, I didn’t like his tone; if he meant it, I wanted to tell him he was full of shite.

Even the album’s title—Achtung Baby—seemed deliberately ugly, somehow vulgar. U2’s approach to LP titles had moved from the majestically Platonic to the winkingly kitsch; it was as if U2 had been Rembrandt and decided to become Andy Warhol. Throughout their musical career, U2 had been scaling the most important mountains with serious intent and now they were dealing in irony, Art’s tawdry foothills, refuge of climbers afraid of heights. And I found the album’s cover revolting—another piece of fraud that hack Warhol might’ve slapped together….

Walking along 57th Street that night in the amplified cold of Manhattan’s glass canyons, I was in a bad place. U2 had changed and I was already dealing with way too many changes, the chagrin of which was that most of them were self-wrought. Somehow, Achtung Baby felt like a betrayal, one of many. One too many.

While the album hasn’t risen in my estimation, I’ve made peace with it in the larger context of U2’s canon, a creative output which continued long after the record’s release. As a poet, as well as an avid Rock historian, I respect the move. Wallace Stevens entitled the second section of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, his long poem about poetry itself, It Must Change. Pete Townshend wrote The Who song “Music Must Change.” And The Beatles exemplified this principle better than anyone; George Martin, their producer and longtime collaborator, noted that what set The Beatles apart from their competition was, quite simply, they never made the same album twice.

When the world changed for me again, I wasn’t blindsided. That was a lesson Achtung Baby and life taught me.