Forty Minutes Left
In 1983, U2 had worked through the night at Windmill Lane in Dublin, finishing War. At six in the morning they were still one song short. Another band, Minor Detail, was booked in for eight and had already turned up.
Bono opened a Bible to Psalm 40 and sang it down almost as written. Adam Clayton had gone home, so Edge moved between guitar and bass. Bono's account of the whole thing: about ten minutes to write it, ten to record it, ten to mix it, ten to play it.
They titled it with the number of the psalm. Bono has been careful to add that the forty minutes had nothing to do with the name. 40.
It is the least worked-on track on the record, and it outlasted all the others.
The Verse They Barely Changed
The song follows the psalm's opening almost line for line — the pit, the rock, the new song placed in the mouth. Bono added one phrase that is not in the text, and it became the part everyone remembers.
"I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God."
Read the order of the verbs. The waiting comes first. Apart from the cry, the speaker does nothing to get himself out — everything after is someone else's work: inclined, heard, brought up, set, established, put. The psalm is not about the strength to climb out. It is about being lifted while still in the clay.
The phrase Bono added was a question: How long to sing this song? It is not from Psalm 40. It is the cry of Psalm 13, of Habakkuk, of every lament that refuses to resolve. Dropped into a psalm of rescue, it does something strange — it puts the waiting back in.
The Part the Band Doesn't Sing
"40" closed every night of the 1983 War tour, and it stayed the closing song until January 1990 — in those seven years only about two dozen shows ended on anything else. Then it disappeared for fifteen years and came back on the Vertigo tour in 2005.
The arrangement was always the same. Bono left first, then Edge, then Adam. Larry Mullen Jr. kept the snare going alone, and then he left too.
The crowd did not stop. Tens of thousands of people kept singing how long to sing this song into an empty stage — sometimes for several minutes, out into the car parks.
This is not a rock and roll invention. Look at the line printed above the psalm itself: To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David. Before the first word of the poem there is a note handing the piece to whoever is conducting. One man writes it; a choir is assumed. Psalm 40 says the new song was put in my mouth — but a mouth is not a private place. Something put there gets passed on.
The band understood the assignment. They wrote a song they could walk away from.
Try the three verses by hand. Notice how little the speaker does, and how long the waiting is allowed to last before anything is asked of you.
A song you can be absent from is the only kind worth writing.