Unsatisfied Heart

Hailing back to early 1983, in the midst of what would become known retroactively as the Born in the U.S.A. Sessions, “Unsatisfied Heart” existed in the wild for decades only as a demo recorded by Bruce in his home studio.

When it was finally released in 2025 on L.A. Garage Sessions ’83, however, it was in a far more polished form. And unlike most of its album-mates, the released version of “Unsatisfied Heart” features contributions from E Street Band members Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, making it a genuinely new and unheard entity.

This essay was originally written in 2018 and is based on the long-circulating bootleg demo. However, the lyrical differences are minor (with one notable exception, acknowledged below), so I’ve left the bulk of the text unaltered.

The lineage of “Unsatisfied Heart” is a bit tangled. We know that at pretty much any point in time, Bruce has any number of songs in various stages of completion, so it shouldn’t be too surprising to discover that Bruce was working on two concurrent songs that shared virtually the same lyrics: one was “Fugitive’s Dream (Ballad)” (discussed at length elsewhere in these pages); the other was “Unsatisfied Heart.”

There’s been research and conjecture about these songs (and others that Bruce wrote during this period) over the years, attempting to match up known recording dates and writing periods with leaked demos in attempt to trace the development from one incarnation of a song to the next, and it is indeed possible that at some point Bruce abandoned one of these songs and simply used its lyrics for the other. But I it’s more likely that Bruce just hadn’t fully committed to either and was playing with both simultaneously.

Studio logs actually support both hypotheses: Both versions of “Fugitive’s Dream” were recorded earlier in 1983, but there was actually one date–March 24–where Bruce recorded both the released version of “Fugitive’s Dream” and an early version of “Unsatisfied Heart.”

In any event, this certainly isn’t the only instance of two released Springsteen songs sharing lyrics, but it’s a great example of how small differences can make a big impact.

Both songs share the same first verse (with a couple of minor wording differences):

Sir, I am a pilgrim, a stranger in this land
Once I had a home here, my salvation was at hand
I lived in a house of gold, yeah, on a far hillside
I had two beautiful children and a kind and loving wife

These are hardly the only two Springsteen songs to share this scenario. Bruce would later distill these lines down to “I had a job, I had a girl; I had something going, mister, in this world,” and use that motif in “Downbound Train,” and “Dead Man Walkin’.” Clearly, the idea of feeling lost and rootless in a place that was once very much one’s anchor was an idea that pre-occupied him at least for a time, and while Bruce was not yet a family man, it certainly doesn’t take an imaginative leap to understand how the life of a touring rock star might make one feel a bit removed from one’s roots.

The scene is set, and now the story starts:

One day a man came to town with nothing and nowhere to go
He came to me and he mentioned something I’d done a long time ago
I allowed him into my home on his vow that secret wouldn’t see the light
At night I’d lay awake in my wife’s arms, she’d sigh, “George, you alright?”

This is where “Unsatisfied Heart” diverges from “Fugitive’s Dream.” Both songs share essentially the same first three lines of that verse–the stranger who arrives at your house bearing knowledge of your secret past, and terrified of it being revealed, the singer admits the stranger into his home.

It’s a great setup for a story or a song. There are any number of paths the tale might follow from here, and Bruce chose two: “Fugitive’s Dream (Ballad)” is the darker one, in which it’s implied that the protagonist takes (or at least considers) extreme measures to protect his secret. In “Unsatisfied Heart,” however, there’s no sinister threat–just the awakening of memories of a former life and and the slow, simmering, doubt of what might have been.

In the demo version of “Unsatisfied Heart,” Bruce sings:

Day after day, time, yeah, time passed on by
But I could feel myself changing, yeah, changing deep inside
One night I woke up and as my wife did sleep
I got dressed in the darkness and I fled into the street

The released version features a different opening couplet for this verse:

The life I built so carefully, it fell before my sin
My home became my prison, my truth hidden deep within

This is a rare instance where I prefer the earlier lyrics to the final ones. The latter lines are a bit too on the nose for my liking, spelling out explicitly what the earlier lyrics clearly imply but leave to the listener to interpret. Both versions tell the same story, however, so it’s a minor quibble.

Both versions lead up to the same event: I got dressed in the darkness and I fled into the street.”

We never learn the singer’s secret, either in “Fugitive’s Dream (Ballad)” or in “Unsatisfied Heart,” although it’s strongly implied in the former that he’d abandoned his former life–and perhaps a family–and had managed to keep that life walled off even in his own mind and heart. But the appearance of the stranger shook him, woke him, and now he can’t shut that door in his heart again.

Well, night after night the same dream keeps coming ’round
I’m standing high in the green hills on the outskirts of town
Night air fills my lungs and rustles my shirt
I can see the house where we lived, the building where I used to work
As I draw near the town’s lit by a red summer moon
I feel your arms around me, I wake up in this room

This final verse is delightfully and hauntingly cryptic. Perhaps it’s a flash forward in time: our narrator has abandoned his life once again. He is alone again, thinking back on what he had and lost. Or perhaps this time he stayed but is unable to shake the guilt from his re-awakened sin.

Either way, the pain is the same. There’s a reason why Bruce added a chorus only to “Unsatisfied Heart,” and it’s as simple and serious as:

Can you live with an unsatisfied heart?

In “Fugitive’s Dream (Ballad)” it’s implied that the secret is more intimate–perhaps a same-sex relationship with the stranger, although Bruce takes pains to keep the past cloudy–and while that song ends on a similar reflective scene, its imagery is darker and lonelier.

In a sense, “Fugitive’s Dream (Ballad)” presaged the style of songwriting that would feature heavily on The Ghost of Tom Joad, and “Unsatisfied Heart” might have been right at home on Tunnel of Love. The closing lines of “Brilliant Disguise” would fit aptly here:

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.

“Unsatisfied Heart” would have almost assuredly been included on a Nebraska sequel (which Bruce had in fact briefly considered as his next album, before choosing another path), but instead it remained in the vault for more than four decades.

Bruce has never performed it , but shockingly it did turn up–once–in a War on Drugs setlist in 2018, proving that band’s boss bona fides and seriously impressing Bruce fans who caught the bands’ performance in person or on YouTube.

Unsatisfied Heart
Recorded: June 13, 1983
Released: L.A. Garage Sessions ’83 (2025), Lost and Found (2025)
Never performed

© September 12, 2018 / December 21, 2025