The Louder Than Life Music Festival kicks off today in Louisville and among the acts scheduled to perform this year, Judas Priest for the band's guitarist Richie Faulkner, will mark the return to the same stage where he suffered an aortic aneurysm in 2021.

Faulkner recently talked about being rushed to university of Louisville Hospital to undergo emergency open heart surgery and what it's taken to get back out on stage.

I think if anything is luck is the celebration for me more than anything.

You know, what went down that night?

You know, depends on who you talk to.

I shouldn't be able to do that.

I was lucky to even get through the night and and carry on, you know?

So to come back in and play the festival three years later, it feels like a bit of a bit of a triumph, really, to kind of complete the festival, complete the gig as I was meant to do the first time.

You know what I mean?

I remember the show.

I remember when it happened.

I remember what it felt like.

I remember thinking, This isn't usually what happens.

This is something that is unusual.

And I remember feeling fine and I've never fainted before.

And I remember at the end of the show, usually I lift the guitar above my head, you know, in the air.

And I remember I couldn't do it.

And then from that, I remember going back to the dressing room.

I didn't want to make a fuss, you know, I didn't think anything was wrong.

So I said, okay, well, if if they want to take me to the hospital to do some checks, I'm not going to go wearing leather and starts.

I'm not going to turn up in the hospital wearing, you know, what I wear on stage.

So I went back to the dressing room.

I got changed.

And in hindsight, I don't know how I did it.

I don't know how, you know, knowing what I know now about the condition and what happened.

Sometimes people have minutes to live, you know, and for some reason I was able to get back to the dressing room and it was on the other side of the the festival site, you know.

So I went back, changed, got back on the golf cart, went back to where the ambulance was, got back in the ambulance, and we went from there.

There was things connected with the surgery that happened neurologically, you know, brain stuff.

So that is affected a little bit.

On the right side.

Some are picking hand.

Sometimes I have to kind of I have to practice a little bit more now.

One of the one of the things I have to look out for is vitamin K, which is found in a lot of green vegetables and stuff.

I've got to be careful how thick my blood is.

So if it's too thick, you know, it's stroke territory and if it's too thin, if you cut yourself, it won't congeal and clot and heat up, you know, So you've got to kind of be in the middle and vitamin K makes your blood thicker.

So that's one thing I've got to be wary of.

Too much alcohol will make it go too thin.

So I've got to, you know, wash diet and things like that.

But fortunately, for the most part, I haven't had to adjust my lifestyle too much.

And, you know, I'm grateful for that.

I can still get out on the road and play and tour and, you know, play with my child and everything like that.

So it's just those small things that I have to be careful of.

Glad to see he has made that recovery.

Falconer and the rest of Judas Priest are scheduled to perform at the Louder Than Life Festival Sunday night,