Exit

The lyrics convey the dark impulses of a desperate man. At an LA concert on November 18, 1987, Bono said, "This is a song about a religious man who became a very dangerous man when he couldn't work out the mystery, on the hands of love."

In the book U2 by U2, Bono says "Exit" was inspired by Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, both famous books about murderers. "This was my attempt at writing a story in the mind of a killer," he explained. "It is all very well to address America and the violence that is an aggressive foreign policy but to really understand that you have to get under the skin of your own darkness, the violence we all contain within us. Violence is something I know quite a bit about. I have a side of me which, in a corner, can be very violent. It's the least attractive thing in anyone and I wanted to own up to that."

Bono slipped on the stage and dislocated his shoulder while performing this song at RFK Stadium in Washington on September 20,1987.