Songfacts®:

• The tightly coiled title track of Pearl Jam's tenth studio album finds Eddie Vedder singing about a girl who struck him within his heart like a bolt of lightning. He goes on to lament about having to let the mystery woman go. "I wonder who that's about," commented guitarist Mike McCready to Billboard magazine. "The cool thing is kind of not knowing. I can put in the context of what I feel and who I know just like you can…the important thing is what it means to you the listener."
• The song was debuted live at Chicago's Wrigley Field in July 2013 after a thunderstorm threw literal lightning bolts in the sky around the baseball stadium.
• Longtime producer Brendan O'Brien said Eddie Vedder wrote the lyrics for this midtempo rocker using the same typewriter he's written every Pearl Jam album on since they met in the early '90s.
• The Lightning Bolt album was Pearl Jam's fifth chart-topping LP in the US. It also reached #1 in Australia, Belgium, Croatia, Ireland and Portugal, while its entry into the UK chart at #2 equaled the best-ever performance in that country.