Bono told Rolling Stone that this song is about agape love. The Greeks have many words for love: agape love is unconditional love, like the love for God. This is as opposed to erotic love (“eros”) and friendly love (“philia”). The interviewer then asked Bono if this song was about his mother and he agreed, but said that it could also be about God:

I didn’t really write lyrics in the beginning. There was just sketching. Emotional sketches of an emotional landscape. The song is about agape love. It is about unconditional love.

In a separate interview with Rolling Stone, Bono elaborated:

To be honest, I don’t remember that much about my mother. I forget what she looks like. I was fourteen or fifteen when she died, but I don’t remember. I wasn’t close to my mother or father. And that’s why, when it all went wrong – when my mother died – I felt a real resentment, because I actually had never got a chance …… to feel that unconditional love a mother has for a child. There was a feeling of that house pulled down on top of me, because after the death of my mother that house was no longer a home – it was just a house. That’s what ”I Will Follow” is about. It’s a little sketch about that unconditional love a mother has for a child: ”If you walk away, walk away I will follow,” and ”I was on the outside when you said you needed me/I was looking at myself I was blind I could not see.” It’s a really chronic lyric.