U2’s new album nearly finished

U2’s follow-up to the Grammy-winning “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” album three years ago is “nearly finished,” singer Bono told a gathering in Dublin recently. “We’re in the home straight.... It’s filled with big tunes and it’s driven by a guitar player who is sick of the sight of me shaking hands with dodgy politicians.”

Bono made his comments at an exhibition of his paintings that accompany a new recording of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” a project benefiting the Irish Hospice Foundation, which cared for the singer’s father, Bob Hewson, before his death from cancer two years ago.

-- Randy Lewis