Coming up, i’m going to share a countdown that is very personal to me. Several weeks ago I had a miracle in my life. I was on the verge of death from Hypoxia caused by severe pneumonia. I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to my brain and my oxygen level got all the way down to 40% and my Heart rate was 190. As I rushed to the hospital, I’ve spent weeks healing and today I want to count down the song that have helped me heal, motivated my recovery and lifted me in my darkest hour. Including 1 that literally saved my life… and they all have remarkable stories. Including the story of Bob Marley, whose home had just been shot up. But as he sat quietly at a window watching a few little birds land on the sill, he found an enduring message of comfort. Also, we’re covering the Paul Simon who handed off his most personal composition to Art Garfunkel because he believed his voice was meant to carry it… But resentment over the song’s success eventually broke them apart. Could they ever fix their friendship? And then there’s AC/DC, the band that spent most of the 80s unraveling — addiction, firings, divorces, and no real hits. But in the 90s they emerged with a riff so unstoppable that it single-handedly reset their entire legacy. Let’s get started.
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Executive Producer
Brandon Fugal
Honorary Producers
22Unchained, Thomas Halterman, Keith Novak, Yvonne Fus, Jeffrey Thorn
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#classicrock #80smusic #onehitwonder
Hey Music Junkies… Today I want to share something a little out of the norm. These are he songs that were on my playlist that helped me rise from the ashes They motivated me, they lifted me and most of all they healed me. Let’s get into it. Kicking off our countdown at #10 is a jolt of pure electricity, a song that’s been charging up stadiums for over three decades. If healing starts with getting your heart pumping again, nobody does CPR quite like AC/DC and Thunderstruck. After singer Bon Scott died in 1980, Brian Johnson stepped in making for one of the rare replacement singer success stories in rock history. In fact Brian Johnson stepped in some very big shoes to fill and was the lead singer on what would become the biggest selling rock record ever in Back in Black and it made ACDC global superstars, but the rest of the 80s were rough. Drummer Phil Rudd was fired in 1983, and Fly on the Wall in 1985 got a poor reception. By 1988, AC/DC was struggling to rediscover their early success. But they’d find it in 1990 with Thunderstruck from their album The Razors Edge.
The band loved telling something of a tall tale about “Thunderstruck.” Angus had supposedly been on a plane that got struck by lightning during a terrifying storm. But in the liner notes for the 2003 reissue of The Razors Edge, he gave a plainer account. He said, “It started off from a little trick that I had on guitar. I played it to Mal, and he said, ‘Oh I’ve got a good rhythm idea that will sit well in the back.’ We built the song up from that.” As for the lyrics, Angus said they just needed a good title, something in the spirit of “Powerage” or “Highway to Hell.” And Thunderstruck did the trick.
The band still had plenty of problems going into the album. In 1988, Malcolm stepped away from the Blow Up Your Video tour to start treatment for alcohol dependency. Drummer Simon Wright then left to join Dio. Brian Johnson was going through a divorce, so Angus and Malcolm wrote the songs without him.
Their brother George, who had produced some of their earlier albums also had to step away. They brought in Bruce Fairbairn, the producer behind hits for Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, and recorded at his Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver. But “Thunderstruck” was like lighting in a bottle for the band. It climbed to #5 on the Mainstream Rock chart. It was AC/DC’s biggest hits almost a decade. Today, the song is still going strong. In October 2025, 35 years after its release, “Thunderstruck” re-entered Billboard’s Global 200 chart and has spent 112 weeks on that chart so far. The song’s legacy is colossal and it remains one of the most recognizable anthems in hard rock history. Though it might not seem like traditional "healing" music at first glance, "Thunderstruck" is a powerful therapeutic release for pent-up frustration.
