The remnants of grief can strike when you're not looking. When you think the pain has subsided. When life feels like it can finally go on again. It was this cruel fact, and the salvation that often follows, that served as the inspiration for Shannon LaBrie’s new music video for her gorgeous single “Raining Hallelujah.”

“The lyrics of this song are so big that I just knew that the music video has to feel big too,” says LaBrie of the awe-inspiring video, which is premiering exclusively on The Boot. “Colorado is where I feel most at home, and also where I have healed the most.”

Indeed, the country singer-songwriter’s life hasn’t always been easy, but it was within the Colorado mountains that she began her journey to face a decade's worth of her own grief and struggles, so it was within that specific landscape that she wanted to tell the visual story of “Raining Hallelujah.”

“The lake in the video was the same lake I was baptized in,” explains LaBrie. “All the running scenes were done on the roads that I ran; those dirt roads are really a part of my healing. And Rocky Mountain National Park? Well, it's just a place where you go to sit and cry and to believe and to search. And so, every place we went to film this video felt so very personal.”

In one particularly moving shot, LaBrie is running up a hill, only to stop and put her hands on her knees — a symbol of both physical and mental exhaustion.

“How many times in our lives have we just felt like everyone's gone ahead of us and we're just stuck in this part where we can't breathe and we can't keep going?” says LaBrie, whose vocals easily conjure up comparisons to the mysterious, yet sultry, sounds of Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild. “To me, that scene is one of the biggest parts of the video.”

Originally written in 2019, “Raining Hallelujah” not only lives on LaBrie's brand-new LP, Building, it was also the first song she wrote alongside her good friend and fellow songwriter Tia Sillers.

“Tia was coming out of a relationship, and she was telling me of this moment when she looked up at the sky while it was storming, only to see a little sliver of a cloud open up and the sun coming down,” LaBrie remembers. “I was like, 'Oh my gosh, can we please write this song right now?'”

Back then, neither LaBrie nor Sillers knew what was to come — racial tensions, political debates, a relentless pandemic — which, after the fact, made the message behind “Raining Hallelujah” both needed and quite timely.

“I do believe some songwriters are a little prophetic, in the sense where it often feels like they have their finger on the pulse of what's about to come,” says LaBrie, who received critical acclaim for her single “Firewalker” in 2020. “I just think creative people are kind of like that. But, yeah, I think we were writing for ourselves in the moment, and then the more we played it, the more we believed it. And then the more I sang it, the more the reality of its truth hit me.”

Fans can keep up with LaBrie at ShannonLaBrie.com.

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