Creed Songs - What's This Life For Lyrics

Creed - What's This Life For

Creed - What's This Life For Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: My Own Prison
Released: 1997

What's This Life For Lyrics

Hurray for
A child that makes it through
If there's any way
Because the answer lies in you
They're laid to rest
Before they've known just what to do
Their souls are lost
Because they could never find

What's This Life For
What's this life for
What's this life for
What's this life for

I see your soul, it's kind of gray
You see my heart, you look away
You see my wrist, I know your pain
I know your purpose on your plane
Don't say a last prayer

Because you could never find

What's this life for
What's this life for
What's this life for
What's this life for

But they ain't here anymore
Don't have to settle the score
Cause we all live
Under the reign of one king

But they ain't here anymore,
Don't have to settle no Goddamn score
'Cause we all live under the reign,
I said, you know, of

One king
One king
One king

But they ain't here anymore,
Don't have to settle no Goddamn score
'Cause we all live under the reign
I said, you know, of

One king
One king
One king

But they ain't here anymore,
Don't have to settle no Goddamn score
Cause we all live under the reign
Of one king

Writer/s: MARK TREMONTI, SCOTT STAPP
Publisher: RESERVOIR MEDIA MANAGEMENT INC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

What's This Life For

A track from Creed's first album, Scott Stapp and Mark Tremonti wrote the song after hearing the news that one of Tremonti's best childhood friends had committed suicide. In our interview with Tremonti , he talked about the meaning: "It's a song about suicide and kids searching for that meaning of life. It's tough sometimes for kids in high school, junior high school, to go through a lot of the depression he went through that led him to commit suicide. So I wrote about that."

As Tremonti remembers it, he wrote the music and also the verse and chorus lyrics - Stapp came up with the bridge.

This became one of Creed's most popular songs, but it took a while to get there. The My Own Prison album was first released in April 1997 on an independent label called Blue Collar Records. It sold well enough in their home turf of Florida to get the attention of BMG subsidiary Wind-Up Records, which signed the band and brought in producer Ron Saint-Germain to remix it.

Wind-Up re-released the album and launched a promotional campaign, breaking the band nationally by distributing the title track to radio stations and commissioning a video, which did well on MTV. The next promotional single was "Torn," which was followed by "What's This Life For." By this time, the band was picking up traction on radio and the album was a top-seller.

In an effort to boost album sales, the Creed singles at this time weren't sold in the US, which made them ineligible for the Billboard Hot 100 chart. However, Billboard had another chart that perfectly suited Creed's sound: Mainstream Rock. In September 1998, "What's This Life For" became the band's first #1 on that chart, taking the top spot for six weeks. The first single from their follow-up album, Human Clay, was "Higher," which stayed at #1 for 17 weeks, longer than any other song in the chart's history to that point.

The video was directed by Ramaa Mosley , who also did Creed's "Higher" video and "Superman (It's Not Easy)" for Five For Fighting.

Striking landscapes are a hallmark of Creed videos, and this one is set in the desert plains, where we see the band performing. In other scenes, we see various disaffected folks trying to escape their cumbersome lives, which they do at the end of the clip, joining the band at the end where they exult under a rain shower as Scott Stapp sings, "We all live under the rain."

The video was shot in a desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California. In our interview with Mosley, she explained: "I had this tremendous fascination with weather and trying to capture this on film. Weather is very mysterious and powerful and I wanted to make a video that set men against the forces of nature. I wanted the video for Creed to feel that the music and the band had performed so passionately that a storm approached."

This was featured in the 1998 movie Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. A version of the video was made incorporating scenes from the film.