Robert on '39'...

"To come to "39" - I don´t feel like having no ideas all the time but sometimes I do. It´s an odd song that didn´t fit in the album easily and wasn´t easy to sing either - with a message like "I don´t know if I still want this anymore, I´ve got nothing to say". It had quite a contradiction in it. If I really hadn´t anymore ideas, I wouldn't have been able to write this song. But this was exactly the point that made it exciting. I told myself that, if I wanted to be honest to myself, then the song had to be on the album." (Zillo Magazine (Feb. 2000)

"I wrote that song on my birthday, just before entering the studio. I had the texts of all songs then, except the one that fitted with the melody of what would become '39'. I had decided not to celebrate my birthday, so I was just sitting in the garden with Mary, and I thought about all the years that had passed and about how time flies by... and I became totally depressed. I figured, looking back, that I hadn't reached what I wanted...
I felt like a failure. And I had the feeling that I was becoming less good. That I had stood still. And that's when I decided to write down honestly what I felt: out of that moment of weakness, I created a good song. I started to sing that text across the loop you hear in the beginning and the sentence that turned out to be the core of the story was 'The fire's almost out and there's nothing left to burn.'
After a while I thought: Jesus, I'm singing here about the fact that there's nothing left to sing about. This is wrong. I also thought: 'Shit, The Cure is the only thing I have in my life, I'm putting all my time into the band instead of doing adventurous things.' While others would say all we've done with the Cure is one big adventure. So I can't complain. And besides, what should I do if I wasn't in The Cure?" (HUMO magazine 23rd February 2000)

"I wrote it during my birthday. Instead of having a party, I just shut myself in a room all alone and started writing my own … Happy Birthday". (Rock Star February 2000)

"I originally wanted the song to sound really monotonous. It was really just one riff, and it was going to be the penultimate track on the album.
"I think everyone, if they're old enough, at some point in their life has thought, 'Where did my passions go, what happened to my desires to change the world?' You have to work harder as you get older, because cynicism is like a creeping insidious enemy that can poison everything. And if I'm really honest, I have to admit that I don't have the same fire, the same desire to be heart, that I had when I was younger.
"But I think that saying 'The fire's almost out' in '39' is not a statement that I'm giving up. I'm just being open and honest about the fact that what's driven me to express myself in the past is just not there like it used to be. That's neither a good nor a bad thing, it's just a fact." (Pulse March 2000)