“I don’t know Bono,” says Rosalía, yet he rewrote a song about her 196 times

Rosalía told Jimmy Fallon on NBC's The Tonight Show that she does not know Bono, yet he had texted her to ask whether certain words in a U2 song about her made sense. She spoke on October 7, 2026, five weeks before the band's album Carnaval De Luz arrives on November 13, 2026.

A word that does not exist in standard Spanish

According to Billboard's account of the interview, Fallon asked what it felt like to learn that U2 had named a song after her, “The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)”. Rosalía, whom Billboard calls a Catalan superstar, seemed dumbstruck and repeated Bono's name like an incantation before answering. “I don’t know Bono,” she laughed. Then she explained that he had written to her about a new song and wanted to check some words.

One word in particular puzzled her. Billboard heard it as “marmolay”, Rolling Stone as “mamole”, and Fallon took it for “marmalade”. Rosalía said she had never met it, looked it up, and found that it does not exist in standard Spanish. Her advice to the Irish singer was short: “feel free to invent your own language”.

She called the dedication “insane” and “mind-blowing”, then sang a few bars of “With Or Without You”.

The exchange is a small scene of a rare kind in pop. A rock band at the end of a nine-year gap between albums asked a younger artist from another language whether its words held up, and she answered with a shrug and a licence.

One hundred ninety-six versions of one song

The song has a long past. NME reports that it began around 2017 as an Edge demo called “Kuti Rocker”, a nod to the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, and passed through the titles “Delilah” and “Child Of The Age” before Rosalía became its subject. The producer Garret “Jacknife” Lee told Rolling Stone that the version on the album is the 196th, with completely rewritten lyrics.

Halfway through those versions, by Lee's reckoning, the song acquired its subject. “Why are we singing about Rosalía?” Lee remembers the band asking, followed by “How is it relevant?” Bono's answer, given to Rolling Stone, rests on a book he first read in the 1990s, The Death and Resurrection Show by Rogan P. Taylor, and on the idea of the mirror.

“We all have some narcissism to contend with,” Bono said. Writing, he added, makes it easy to get lost in one's own reflection. “But there are artists who want to go through the mirror and see what’s on the other side of the mirror.”

Lee told NME that the band steered the track away from its first electric rock sound towards the acoustic feel of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust era and T. Rex, because they wanted to avoid making it feel overly masculine.

Why a living artist, and why not on the track

Bono presents the song as a break with habit. “We normally just write songs about people in jail or dead people,” he told Rolling Stone, adding that this one is “just celebrating somebody just because they’re an extraordinary artist.”

What drew him was Lux, her fourth album, released on November 7, 2025. He said it had reached many of the themes U2 wanted for their own record, down to the title, since both “lux” and “luz” mean light. “She’s arrived at the same point just before us, which is annoying and also really inspiring,” he said, and he named a shared aim, “the re-enchantment of the world” through art. The track opens with Bono in falsetto, in what he calls an impression of her soprano. The idea, Lee said, was first to convince Rosalía to sing it. Then came a second thought: “why would somebody sing on a song about them?” They kept Bono's take.

She does not sing a note on the track.

The point was needed, because the title misled some fans and publications. After U2 announced the tracklist on Thursday, September 24, 2026, Consequence ran an article under the headline “No, Rosalía Is Not on U2's New Album”. A source told the site that “Rosalía inspired the song”, and that “She’s not on it.”

Bono also kept the song from release until he had her consent. Unsure how to reach her, he called their mutual friend Penélope Cruz, who told him to call her directly. “I’m like, ‘I look like a stalker,’” he said. Rosalía, by his account, was “really encouraging” and “made me laugh a lot”. They have since traded texts about the poet Federico García Lorca. They have never met in person.

Bono said that the delay has left him with an awkward position. “It’s just a little embarrassing that she became so popular before we put out the song,” he told Rolling Stone, and “I sort of don’t think I could meet her now. I’m just working up courage to send her the final mix.”

The audience behind the dedication

Both accounts of the exchange come from promotional settings. A late-night talk show books guests who have something to announce, and here Rosalía was preparing a television appearance days away. The Rolling Stone cover story ran five weeks ahead of a record the band wants people to hear. That does not make either account wrong, and the two agree on the outline: a text, a question about words, an encouraging reply. They differ only in tone, since Bono describes a man who feels he looks like a stalker, while she describes someone she has never met asking about a word.

Bono's embarrassment has numbers behind it. Wikipedia's account of Lux, drawing on chart reports, says the album debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 with more than 46,000 album-equivalent units, her first top 10 album there. In Spain it entered at number 1 and was certified platinum the same week. In the United Kingdom it entered at number 4, the highest placing for an album by a Spanish woman in that market, according to the same page.

Billboard adds that Lux debuted at number 1 on five different Billboard charts at once, and that it named her Woman of the Year at its 2026 Latin Women in Music event. Those are trade-press tallies, and the site that publishes them is also one that covers her tour and her television appearances.

The album was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra under Daníel Bjarnason and sung in 13 languages, according to NME, a fact that gives Bono's joke about invented words a second edge. A singer who works in 13 languages is the person he asked about a Spanish word, and her answer was to let him make one up.

On stage, her tour carried a spoken segment. According to Rolling Stone's report of the Tonight Show interview, guests including Chappell Roan, Karol G and Marcello Hernández joined her in a segment called El Confesionario, in which they made confessions before the song “La Perla”. “I just love listening to other people’s stories,” she told Fallon.

In Madrid, where she opened four nights at the Movistar Arena on March 30, 2026, Billboard quoted her recalling one of her first performances at the flamenco venue Casa Patas. “Who would have thought that a decade later I’d be here, filling this arena?” she asked the crowd. Billboard counted an orchestra of about 20 musicians at the centre of the venue and a setlist of more than 20 songs in four acts.

Three dates ahead

The next date is Saturday, October 10, 2026, when NBC says she is the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, hosted by the comedian Shane Gillis. She told Fallon that rehearsals in New York left her time to explore the city, which her tour schedule rarely allowed.

The second is October 16, 2026. NME reports that she appears on Fontaines D.C.'s fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, on a track titled “Where Is Gone?”, released through XL Recordings. The Irish band's record and the U2 song thus put her name on two albums by Irish groups four weeks apart, once as a voice and once as a subject.

The third is November 12, 2026. The Latin Recording Academy says the 27th Latin Grammy Awards will air live on Univision from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, with voting by its members opened on October 1. Lux (Complete Works) is one of ten nominees for Album of the Year, and Complex counts seven nominations for her in all, tied with Karol G, Jorge Drexler and CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso.

Carnaval De Luz follows a day later. By then listeners will know whether the song named after her holds up without her voice on it, and whether the invented word survived the 196 versions.

Sources

• U2 cover story on Carnaval De Luz, Rolling Stone
• Latin Grammy nominees and nominations 2026, The Latin Recording Academy