"Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" is written in a
time signature. The lyrics of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" are addressed to a lover, and imply that their relationship is threatened by some sort of personal or spiritual crisis, coupled with a sense of unease over obligations. This is followed by the entrance of drums and guitar in a familiar U2 rhythm, as Bono describes the burdens of love and how he is "in the black; can't see or be seen." noted that there was considerable laughter and debate during the sessions about whether Bono could get away with singing the repeated "baby"s, one of the most heavily used clichés in pop songs and one that he had avoided up to that point in his songwriting; Flood later commented that "he got away with it alright." staging of "Ultraviolet" features the claw-like stage awash in indigo and violet light. Although the song is ostensibly about love and dependency, like many U2 songs, it also lends itself to religious interpretations. Listeners have heard an allusion to the
Book of Job 29:2–3 and its tale of God serving as a lamp upon Job's head walking through the darkness. Conversely, Steve Stockman, author of
Walk On: The Spiritual Journey Of U2, sees "Ultraviolet" as being about Bono's wife
Ali Hewson, and "how when he feels like trash, she makes him clean," but says there is good reason to interpret the song as being just as much about God. The song's title supports this view: indigo and violet rarely appear in song lyrics as frequently as other colours, while ultraviolet represents an unseen wavelength beyond the visible spectrum. As such, the title evokes the image of
black light or an invisible force permeating the darkness, whose connotations are spiritual and personal, as well as technological, reflecting themes of modern alienation explored elsewhere on
Achtung Baby and its follow-up album,
Zooropa. Dianne Ebertt Beeaff, author of
A Grand Madness: Ten Years on the Road with U2, sees the song's narrator as longing for assistance from any source, religious or secular: "This is a real plea, a bleary worn-down drained wish to disappear. A drowning man desperate to hold hands in the darkness, to have someone else point the way, to be safe and obscure." "Ultraviolet" is also one of several songs Bono has written on the theme of woman as spirit, and it echoes the band's 1980 song "Shadows and Tall Trees" by juxtaposing love with the image of ceilings. A line in
Raymond Carver's late 1980s poem "Suspenders", about the quiet that comes into a house where no one can sleep, was subconsciously recycled by Bono into the lyric. In
Achtung Babys running order, "Ultraviolet" serves, with the other two songs at the album's end, "
Acrobat" and "
Love Is Blindness", to explore how couples face the task of reconciling the suffering they have imposed on each other. The song features a
Motown sound-style "telegraph key" rhythm, which gave it the feeling of a pop song. Producer Eno wrote that a combination of opposites within each song was a signature characteristic of
Achtung Baby and that as part of that, "Ultraviolet" had a "helicopterish melancholy". In
Achtung Babys album package, "Ultraviolet" is presented next to a photograph of a crumbling
Berlin building that has a
Trabant parked in front of it. ==Reception==