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Live - Lightning Crashes

Music Video
ArtistLive
SongLightning Crashes
DirectorJake Scott
ActorJarrett Lennon
GenreRock
IntroNo
OutroNo
Sound MixStereo
Technical Specificationscolour - format unknown

Wiki

Synopsis

Live perform in a dim, carefully arranged room while the video intercuts their still, solemn presence with two parallel scenes. In one, a family grieves beside an older woman's body; in another, a young mother gives birth as relatives and medical figures gather around her. The editing connects the death and birth as simultaneous events, emphasizing the song's vision of life passing from one generation to the next. The imagery is deliberately ambiguous, creating an eerie and emotionally charged visual counterpart to the song.

Factoids & Trivia

  • The video was released in December 1994 to promote Live's album "Throwing Copper."
  • Ed Kowalczyk envisioned the song's events taking place in a hospital, with a death and a birth occurring at the same time. The finished video uses a home-like setting instead, which contributed to viewers reading the scenes as one continuous family tragedy.
  • Many viewers assumed that the older woman was dying as a direct result of the childbirth. Kowalczyk later clarified that the video was meant to show two separate events and a symbolic transfer of life, not a mother dying during labor.
  • The song was dedicated to Barbara Lewis, a 19-year-old friend of the band who was killed by a drunk driver in 1993. Her organs were donated, including a liver transplanted into a 10-month-old baby, an event that informed the song's theme of life continuing through another person.
  • The clip became one of Live's most recognizable visual statements and was later included on the DVD accompanying "Awake: The Best of Live."

Lyrics

lightning crashes, a new mother cries
her placenta falls to the floor
the angel opens her eyes
the confusion sets in
before the doctor can even close the door

lightning crashes, an old mother dies
her intentions fall to the floor
the angel closes her eyes
the confusion that was hers
belongs now, to the baby down the hall

oh now feel it comin' back again
...
© Live - Lightning Crashes. This is an excerpt, provided as citation under fair-use.
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