Elevation

"Elevation" is a song by Irish rock band U2. It is the third track on their tenth studio album, All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000), and was released as the album's third single on 25 June 2001. The song became the band's 16th number-one single in their native Ireland and their second number one in the Netherlands. It also topped the charts in Canada and reached the top 10 in Australia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Scotland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. A different mix of the song, entitled the "Tomb Raider mix", was included on the soundtrack of the 2001 film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. In 2002, "Elevation" won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony. The song lent its namesake to the band's 2001 Elevation Tour. Writing and composition "Elevation" was inspired by a sound that guitarist the Edge achieved from a vintage effects unit when playing his Gibson SG guitar through a Fender Bassman amplifier. He likened the pedal to "some mad funkadelic thing". Co-producer Daniel Lanois, who had brought the unit to the studio, called it his "secret weapon", saying: "It's like a distortion pedal that has a warp, or a tone control, built on. As you push the pedal down you get the high frequency." Within ten minutes, the Edge developed the riff that inspired the rest of the song. He then programmed a rhythm on a drum machine to which the band started playing and lead singer Bono improvised vocals. For the heavily distorted sound of the song's main guitar riff, the Edge played his instrument through a 1970s Hiwatt amplifier. The wah-wah guitar effect at the end of the song was achieved by filtering the tone through an Electrix Filter Factory sound module. The Edge said that "Elevation" was light relief among a sequence of serious songs on the album that included "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", "Kite" and "Walk On", which he collectively described as "farewell songs of one kind of another". Music video