Sarah Jarosz / I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For / my future - Single / 2021
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
yearning, unresolved, quietly devotional
This is a cover of U2's 1987 anthem, reimagined by Sarah Jarosz with acoustic, roots-leaning instrumentation that strips away the song's stadium-rock architecture. The arrangement change shifts the song's gravity from communal anthem to intimate confession, emphasizing the lyric's spiritual restlessness over its arena-ready uplift.
spiritual searching unfulfilled desire faith and doubt restlessness redemption
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an unnamed 'you' who is both a romantic figure and a stand-in for divine grace; the voice is sincere but self-aware of its own contradictions, admitting belief and doubt in the same breath.
What happens
The song moves through a catalog of effort and experience -- physical journeys, romantic encounters, encounters with both sacred and profane figures -- each offered as evidence of searching. Despite accumulating these experiences, the refrain insists that the goal remains unmet, creating a loop structure where confession and admission of failure alternate without resolution.
How it's built
Built on a verse/refrain cycle where each verse introduces a new domain of experience (physical, romantic, spiritual, moral) and the refrain repeats almost unchanged, functioning like a chorus that refuses to develop. The lack of a bridge that resolves tension -- instead the 'kingdom come' verse momentarily gestures toward transcendence before collapsing back into the refrain -- reinforces the theme of perpetual seeking.
Section by section
Opening verses
The physical imagery of climbing and running establishes effort and distance traveled, setting up the irony that all this motion is in service of a static, unreachable goal.
First refrain
“I still haven't found”
The title phrase functions less as a release of tension and more as a confession, landing with resignation rather than defiance in this stripped-down rendition.
Romantic/sensory verse
The shift to physical and romantic imagery introduces desire as another avenue of searching, framed with equal intensity to the spiritual imagery that follows, suggesting love and faith are treated as parallel, inseparable quests.
Angels and devil verse
“warm in the night”
Juxtaposing contact with both sacred and profane figures, and then describing the narrator's own emotional coldness despite that warmth, underscores an internal numbness that none of these encounters can cure.
Kingdom come verse
“colours will bleed into one”
This is the song's closest approach to visionary hope, imagining a unifying, almost apocalyptic resolution, but it's immediately undercut by the admission that the narrator is still in motion, unable to arrive at that imagined wholeness.
Closing verse before final refrains
“carried the cross of my shame”
The address shifts to direct gratitude toward the 'you,' crediting them with liberation and redemption, yet this acknowledgment of grace does not resolve the refrain -- the song ends still suspended in search rather than arrival.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'I have' openings across verses build a résumé of lived experience, mimicking the exhaustive effort of someone trying to prove they've done everything right, which makes the recurring admission of failure more poignant.
- religious allegory
- References to angels, devils, the kingdom come, and carrying a cross frame the romantic plea in explicitly Christian imagery, so the 'you' addressed slides between a lover and a divine or messianic figure.
- paradox
- Pairing warmth with coldness and fire with healing throughout the verses captures the contradictory nature of desire -- simultaneously comforting and destructive.
- refrain as stasis
- Unlike a typical chorus that escalates emotionally, the title line repeats almost verbatim each time, musically and lyrically enacting the stuck, unresolved quality of the search itself.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on the gap between belief and certainty -- the narrator affirms faith, love, and redemption as real and felt, yet structurally the song refuses to let that affirmation translate into resolution, mirroring a spiritual condition where conviction and doubt coexist indefinitely. An alternative reading focuses on romantic longing alone, treating all religious imagery as metaphor for an unattainable lover or idealized connection; this is textually supportable but flattens the song's more explicit theological vocabulary.
Context
This track is a cover of U2's 1987 song from The Joshua Tree, originally written with an explicit gospel-inflected arrangement and a reputation as one of rock's defining anthems of spiritual searching. Sarah Jarosz's version, released as part of a 2021 single pairing with her song 'my future,' recontextualizes the song through her acoustic, folk/bluegrass-adjacent sensibility, trading the original's amplified yearning for something more hushed and reflective. I don't have specific details on the recording circumstances or her stated intent behind choosing this cover.
Listen for
- How the stripped-down arrangement changes the emotional weight of the repeated refrain compared to the original's anthemic swell
- The way the vocal delivery handles the shift between worldly and religious imagery without tonal whiplash
- Whether the 'kingdom come' verse is given any musical lift or kept level with the rest, affecting how hopeful or resigned it feels
- The interplay between instrumental texture and lyrical content, especially in a cover known for subverting its source's scale
About Sarah Jarosz
Sarah Ellen Jarosz is an American singer-songwriter from Wimberley, Texas. Her debut studio album, Song Up in Her Head, was released in 2009 on Sugar Hill Records and the track "Mansinneedof" was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Country Instrumental Performance.
b. 1991 / United States
Full biography and catalogue