Kickstart My Heart

This isn’t metaphor. Nikki Sixx died. Heroin overdose, December 1987, heart stopped, paramedics working on a body that wasn’t responding. Then they stuck a needle full of adrenaline directly into his chest, and his heart started again.

Two years later, he wrote a song about it. Not a song about getting clean, not a cautionary tale, not an apology—a song about the rush of coming back. About that moment when your heart kicks from nothing to everything and suddenly every sensation is overwhelming and alive. Mötley Crüe turned near-death into a party anthem.

The opening is a motorcycle engine revving. Because of course it is. This is Mötley Crüe—subtlety was never on the table. The guitars come in like a car wreck, and Vince Neil starts screaming about how his heart has stopped before and it’s about to stop again, and the whole thing sounds like mainlining gasoline.

Critics dismissed this band as cartoon rockers, and they weren’t wrong. But “Kickstart My Heart” has something most party songs lack: it comes from a real place. When Sixx sings about needing intensity to feel alive, he’s not posturing. He’s describing the only way he knows how to exist. The excess isn’t ironic—it’s survival.

Dr. Feelgood was their commercial peak. The band had finally gotten sober enough to play their instruments properly, and somehow they made their most exhilarating music. The production is tight, the performances locked in, the whole thing crackling with the energy of people who know exactly how close to the edge they’ve been.

Some songs are about living hard. This one’s about living after almost not.