“Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne

"Crazy Train" was Ozzy Osbourne's first single on his own, lifted from his 1980 solo debut Blizzard of Ozz, and it arrives on a riff sharp enough to cut glass. Randy Rhoads plays it, and he wrote the song with Osbourne and bassist Bob Daisley; Lee Kerslake pounds the drums, Daisley chips in backing vocals, and the four of them produced it themselves, with Max Norman engineering.

Under all the flash it's a song about the Cold War and the dread of annihilation hanging over everyone, with Ozzy wailing like a man watching the world jump the tracks. It scraped into the UK top 50 when it first came out, but it took until 2025, after Osbourne's death, for it to reach the Hot 100 at all, climbing as high as 39 and becoming only his second solo single to crack the US top 40.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.