Lightning Crashes

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" lends itself to many misinterpretations of the song's intent. "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. The dedication to Barbara Lewis came after the song was written. But it was something that we hoped would honor the memory of a girl we grew up with and help her family cope with sorrow -- which it seems to have accomplished -- in a fashion in keeping with the theme of the song."

In other words, this song is about the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. The angel opens her eyes in birth, and closes them in death. The angel is both a symbol of the divine and of life, and the living people themselves (eyes opening for the first time in life, closing for the final time in death). The pale blue-colored iris of a newborn baby represents the circle of life. The glory coming out to hide is the spark of the divine hidden within all people. It is there before us in plain sight, but hidden because we see the flesh most often rather than the spirit within.

It is not about the girl who died in the car accident, nor is it about abortion, miscarriage, etc. It is about the peaceful passing of a life (an old mother whose children are grown), and the joyful if hectic arrival of a new life (the new mother and her baby).