The Lightning Strike

Snow Patrol vocalist Gary Lightbody explained to The Sun October 17, 2008 why he wrote this 16 minute epic split into three parts: "I don't have the concentration span to write a 16-minute song. I get bored easily. But each song of the three seemed to explain the other one a lot better and they were all written around the same time and so I guess it's an unusual way of presenting them."

Lightbody told Irish public broadcaster RTE about the song's three parts, which recount a couple being forced to take shelter in a storm and the cherished memory of those transcendent moments: Said Lightbody "The brass and the choir in the first part, 'What if This Storm Ends,' is quite a moment, recorded at Olympic Studio in London. The middle section 'Sunlight' is set on the very west coast of Ireland. The last part 'Daybreak' was really affected by Hansa. It has that Krautrock hypnotic sway to it, and 'Heroes'-type guitars swooning over the top. It's a fitting end to the record because of that."

Lightbody told The Daily Telegraph October 30, 2008 about the incident, which inspired this three-song segue: "I was caught in a really quite devastating storm in Glasgow one night, and I was pretty terrified - 150-mile-an-hour winds, trees falling down. But we went outside the house, and it was also just thrilling. There was this howling wind, but it felt like silence, as if our senses were being too bombarded to cope with what was going on. So the record was born out of that feeling, of two people having a protective shell around each other."