Songfacts®:

• "How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?" sounds like it was written in 1967, discovered under a stack of Stax 45s in someone's attic and dusted off for modern ears. Instead, it was born in the mid-2000s, courtesy of Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, the band that made retro-soul feel less like an act of nostalgia and more like time travel with a horn section.
• The lyrics are almost laughably simple; Sharon Jones asks, repeatedly and with mounting exasperation, how long she has to wait for someone. That's it. No twist ending, no Shakespearean drama. But when Sharon Jones asked anything, you listened. She had the kind of voice that could make a grocery list sound like a plea from the heavens. (Jones died in 2016 at age 60 after having a stroke).
• Dap-Kings bassist and bandleader Bosco Mann wrote the song about waiting for guitarist Binky Griptite, who had a reputation for being late for sessions. "I was basically joking about how long we'd have to wait for Binky to show up," he told Uncut magazine.
• "How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?" is essentially the cousin of every other song about waiting, from Carly Simon's "Anticipation" (written while waiting for Cat Stevens to turn up for a date) to Richard Marx' "Right Here Waiting." Only here, Sharon Jones makes the question sound less rhetorical and more like a warning: show up, or the band starts without you.
• Musically, the track is a masterclass in the Dap-Kings' mission: make Brooklyn in 2005 sound like New Orleans in 1968. It opens with Homer "Funky-Foot" Steinweiss's drum break, inspired by James Black's loose, rolling funk with Eddie Bo. Then the whole band kicks in, Binky with a descending guitar lick, Neal Sugarman on sax, Dave Guy on trumpet, Bosco on bass, and Sharon's vocals cutting through like a sermon.
• The song carried a fair amount of career luck. It was the first tune the full band played on national television - on Late Night with Conan O'Brien - a slot they got only because another act canceled at the last minute. ("That came right out of nowhere," Sugarman recalled.) The appearance worked wonders, quickly swelling their live crowds.
• "How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?" appears on the Dap-Kings' 2005 album Naturally, the first recorded at their Bushwick "House of Soul" studio, a place so DIY that Sharon Jones handled some of the wiring. The record went on to sell over 200,000 copies, helping launch collaborations with Mark Ronson and, ultimately, Amy Winehouse on Back to Black. Without Naturally, "Rehab" might not sound the way we know it.
• The song prominently features in the 2020 movie The High Note, a music industry drama starring Dakota Johnson and Tracee Ellis Ross.
• "How Long Do I Have to Wait for You?" shows up in the 2014 Vampire Diaries episode "Do You Remember the First Time?" during a pivotal scene when Damon is drinking at a bar and Elena approaches him, asking to be taken back to the place where she last told him she loved him. The track also turns up in another 2014 Vampire Diaries episode, "Black Hole Sun."