This song is about a pilot of a spacecraft who is suffering a great deal of guilt concerning the death of his co-pilot Jim during a previous flight. He begins hallucinating that he hears Jim playing a guitar, confusing and scaring the passengers with his outbursts of “Hey, who’s that playing the guitar?!”
The pilot goes into Jim’s old quarters–not yet emptied out–and finds in Jim’s closet a lion costume. The pilot puts it on.
As the Lion, the pilot takes over the ship. While the passengers try to comfort each other, the Lion communicates via phone with ground control, who is attempting to talk him down.
But the pressure only makes things worse, and the Lion finds there is only one way to resolve his guilt. He embraces Jim’s guitar playing, yelling for someone to turn up the volume as he steers the ship on a new heading–directly into the sun.
Lion dances while Jim jams as they watch the Earth float further and further back, waving goodbye until the ship plunges into its fiery destruction.
There, I got that off my chest. This was the music video I always imagined for the song, rather than the fairly goofy one that actually got made.
