Pop Song 180 'Lightning Crashes' Live 1993

Pop Song 180 'Lightning Crashes' Live 1993

The band dedicated the song to a high school friend, Barbara Lewis, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1993.

Lead singer Ed Kowalczyk said, "I wrote 'Lightning Crashes' on an acoustic guitar in my brother's bedroom shortly before I had moved out of my parents' house and gotten my first place of my own." Kowalczyk says that the video for "Lightning Crashes" has caused misinterpretations of the song's intent.

“Lightning Crashes” was recorded and produced with Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison as part of the sessions for Live’s sophomore effort, Throwing Copper, at the famed Pachyderm Studio in Minnesota, during the summer of 1993. Around this time, Barbara Lewis, a longtime friend of the band, was killed by a drunk driver while fleeing from the police after a robbery in York. The band dedicated the song to Lewis, who was only 19 when she died.

“It was something that we hoped would honor the memory of a girl we grew up with and help her family cope with the sorrow – which it seems to have accomplished – keeping with the theme of the song,” Kowalcyzk said, in a 1995 interview in Spin magazine. Lewis was also a registered organ donor; when she died, she helped save the lives of many people, including a ten-month-old baby who received her liver.

While the clip is shot in a home environment, I envisioned it taking place in a hospital, where all these simultaneous deaths and births are going on, one family mourning the loss of a woman while a screaming baby emerges from a young mother in another room. Nobody's dying in the act of childbirth, as some viewers think. What you're seeing is actually a happy ending based on a kind of transference of life.

New York magazine described the band as "deeply mystical" and claimed that the song was, "The story of a...connection between an old lady dying and a new mother at the moment of giving birth." Just a few years before, Kowalczyk discovered the writings of Indian spiritualist Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose philosophy of living life from a place of selflessness and humility influenced the singer’s songwriting process, as well as the band’s creative philosophy. https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/live-lightning-crashes-story-behind-song