Exit (song) - Writing and Recording

Writing and Recording

"If you try and dissect a jam and then reconstruct a jam, you can get to the point where you've killed it. But if you can capture the moment and edit it into some kind of a shape where people overlook any timing or tuning discrepancies, then you don't lose the inspiration and momentum and you kind of capture the pearl."

"Exit" was created on the final day of recording for The Joshua Tree. It developed from a full band jam, of which a single take was made and recorded. Bassist Adam Clayton noted that the result was "quite a long piece", which producer Brian Eno edited it down to the end length. Guitarist The Edge said "it started off as an exercise in playing together with a kind of mood and a place in mind. And it really, for me, it brought me there, it really did succeed as an experiment." Producer Daniel Lanois said "There's something that happens when U2 bash it out in the band room... and sometimes things get out of control, sonically, in a good way. Out of control in the sense that you don't know what it is anymore, it just takes on a life of its own, and it makes people do things." Speaking of the jam, he noted "it was a long jam, and there was just this one section of it that had some kind of magic to it, and we just decided to turn it into something."

The lyrics were inspired by Norman Mailer's 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Executioner's Song, written about serial killer Gary Gilmore, and by Truman Capote's 1966 novel In Cold Blood. Lead singer Bono had read both novels and wanted to try and write "a story in the mind of a killer". Further reading of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver caused him to try and understand "the ordinary stock first and then the outsiders, the driftwood — those on the fringes of the promised land, cut off from the American dream." Bono described the lyrics as "just a short story really, except I left out a few of the verses because I liked it as a sketch. It's just about a guy who gets an idea into his head. He picks it up off a preacher on the radio or something and goes out...". He noted that, although 30 songs were in contention for inclusion on the album, he "wanted a song with that sense of violence in it, especially before 'Mothers of the Disappeared'."