“Touched By Lightning” is David Cassidy’s grown-up love shock—one sudden, electrifying connection that leaves you altered, as if the heart has been rewritten in a single flash.
By the time David Cassidy recorded “Touched By Lightning” (often misremembered as “Touched By The Lightning,” but officially listed without “the”), he was long past the bright, television-lit rush of teen-idol fame. This song belongs to the chapter where he’s trying—quietly, insistently—to be heard as an adult pop-rock singer with a private interior life. It appears on his 1985 studio album Romance, produced by Alan Tarney and released in 1985 on Arista (and, notably, released outside the U.S.—Europe and other territories—because his later ’70s albums hadn’t been charting there).
And because “Touched By Lightning” was not released as a single, it didn’t have a chart “debut position” of its own on the big singles lists. Its public “arrival” is best measured through the album that carried it: Romance reached No. 20 on the UK Albums Chart in June 1985. That’s a meaningful detail, because it frames the song correctly—not as a radio conquest, but as a track discovered the old-fashioned way, by people who lived with an album and let certain songs find them when the room was quiet enough.
The writing credit tells another part of the story. “Touched By Lightning” is co-written by David Cassidy and Alan Tarney. Tarney, known for sleek, emotionally direct pop craftsmanship, gives the track its polished architecture; Cassidy supplies the lived-in ache behind the words. There’s something telling about that partnership: it’s the sound of a performer trying to translate personal history into clean melody, as if tidying the chaos of feeling into a song you can play twice in a row without falling apart.
If I’m speaking to you like a radio storyteller—voice low, late-hour friendly—I’d say this song doesn’t begin with fireworks. It begins with a mood. It feels like driving under a sky that can’t decide what it’s going to do, the air heavy with the possibility of rain. And then—there it is—that emotional lightning strike the title promises: a moment of connection so immediate it’s almost frightening. Not “love” in the grand, cinematic sense, but that rarer sensation: recognition. The sense that someone has stepped into your life and, without trying, rearranged the furniture inside you.
That’s the meaning that keeps “Touched By Lightning” from being just another ’80s pop-rock album cut. The lightning isn’t merely a metaphor for excitement; it’s a metaphor for change without permission. Lightning doesn’t ask whether you’re ready. It arrives, it illuminates everything for a split second, and afterward you’re left checking what’s still standing. In a subtle way, the song is about vulnerability—about the terrifying truth that the heart can be rewritten quickly, even when you’ve trained yourself to be careful.
And when you place it inside Romance, the title takes on a second layer. The album is often described as written around Cassidy’s marriage and the years it took to complete the project, with his personal life sitting just behind the glass of the songs. So “lightning” can be heard not only as romantic thrill, but as the jolt that wakes a person up—an adult awakening, the kind you only recognize in hindsight.
There’s also a wistful irony in how the track has traveled over time. Digital platforms list it plainly—“Touched By Lightning” (1985)—quiet evidence that it still exists, still waiting for the listener who stumbles upon it in the right frame of mind. It’s the kind of song that doesn’t demand the room. It keeps its dignity. It lets you come to it.
So if you’re revisiting David Cassidy through this track, you’re not just hearing a former teen star trying on a new suit. You’re hearing a man insisting—softly, stubbornly—that a public image is not the whole life. “Touched By Lightning” is what remains after the posters come down: a small confession with an ’80s sheen, a pulse of longing, and that familiar human truth—sometimes one moment is enough to change the weather inside you.