How long must we sing this song?

[Techie2000]

Anyone else notice that the phrase "How long must we sing this song" is used in a lot of U2 songs? So far I've noticed it in the following songs...

-Sunday Bloody Sunday
-40
-Bad

Now that curiosity has gotten the best of me, I'm compiling a list, so feel free to countribute/add to it.

 

[BVS]

Bad?! Never heard that line in Bad before, unless he improvised it in a live show before...but it's not in the studio version.

I heard Bono once say he was so rushed when putting 40 together that he just took the line from SBS as he was improvising in the studio but never meant to keep it in, but then realised how well it fit.

 

[ylimeU2]

This doesn't help in your question of other songs that have the line, but it does explain a little, maybe, about why he uses it so often. Bono did an introduction to "Selections from the Book of Pslams", published by Grove Press, and in it, he talks a little about it. He said about the verse...

I had a thought of it as a nagging question-pulling at the hem of an invisable diety whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long hunger? How long hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of precocious, hell-bent adolescenence has been discarded? I thought it odd that the vocalising of such questions could bring such comfort.

 

[~*Buffalo*~]

I heard Bono once say he was so rushed when putting 40 together that he just took the line from SBS as he was improvising in the studio but never meant to keep it in, but then realised how well it fit. [/B]

Well, in Psalm 40 (and in the song "40" as well) it says "I will sing a new song." I always thought it referred to that. I've also read that SBS started off War as a tragic kind of a song, and 40 ends it with the same lines but as a hopeful song.