"Mount Zion" (2011)
Demo Song
Background Information
“Mount Zion” was a working title for a song being developed for No Line on the Horizon and the follow up, Songs of Ascent.
In an early May, 2011 interview published in Hot Press magazine with journalist Olaf Tyaransen, Bono revealed some information about a few of the new songs that the band had been working on. At that time the album was still being worked on under the title Songs of Ascent, and was said to be near completion:
No, actually we’ve got a few going (laughs). We have Songs of Ascent, which is a kind of ecstatic album, ambient, very beautiful songs. But it’s a real stained-glass window of a record, elegiac, I think you could describe some of the songs, beautiful. There’s one song called “Mount Zion,” that’s beautiful. There’s a song called “Soon”, there’s a song called “Every Breaking Wave”. Then there’s — we went in to make some club music with RedOne and we got some very extraordinary club sounding stuff, one called “I’ll Believe Her When She Sings”. Let me think if I can remember all of them now … “North Star”, that’s a ballad actually, that’s a beautiful song: we’ve actually played it acoustically onstage a little bit on the tour. And then we, the sort of rock album — although I think “rock” is the wrong word for it — the next sort of “regular U2 band” album, we started to make with Danger Mouse.
The last we heard of from Songs of Ascent, lead us to believe that the album is still sitting mostly complete and waiting for release. If so, we may see “Mount Zion” released some day.