Songfacts®:

• This atmospheric track from the Los Angeles singer-songwriter Alex Bloom explores a heady topic. "I liked the idea of writing about the existential elevator ride of life, as trite as that may sound," he told Songfacts. "The elevator ends up taking you to a lot of places you would've never expected. It's something I think everyone is thinking about all the time, so I just wanted to explore another metaphor for it. The song is ultimately about the struggle of accepting your current state, or the unwillingness to do so. Dealing with mortality, etcetera."
• It was a keyboard preset that triggered the musical idea for this one. Bloom explains: "I wrote 'Elevator' while I was living in Brooklyn. I started listening to more music that had previously been out of my comfort zone, and it started to influence me. Having moved from LA to New York had an effect on my taste in general. I had been obsessed with the Radiohead album In Rainbows, particularly the arrangements on that album, and I had been delving into exactly what makes that record so great.
  
  The inspiration for Elevator really came from this little white Casio keyboard I have that has preset beats. I plugged it into my amp and just set it to the 'Rock' preset and immediately after, I started with this guitar riff. I noticed that the shape and movement of the chord I used kind of looked like an elevator, and since it was going up and down it reminded me of Tower of Terror, the old California Adventure ride."
• This song got some heat on Spotify when it was added to their Chill Vibes playlist. It racked up 250,000 plays on the service.
• In March 2019, Casey Barth of the group RKCB remixed "Elevator." This version was released as the "Stuffed Animals remix.