Roll of the Dice: 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” exists in the wild only as a demo recorded by Bruce in his home studio.

The lineage of “Unsatisfied Heart” is a bit of a mystery, however. 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” (which I’ll discuss at length in a future article; the other was “Unsatisfied Heart.”

There’s been some research and conjecture about these songs (and others that Bruce wrote during this period), 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 suspect it’s more likely that Bruce just hadn’t fully committed to either and was playing with both simultaneously. Even had they both been released, it certainly wouldn’t have been the only instance of two released Springsteen songs sharing lyrics.

In any event, 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,” “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” is the creepier 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.

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

There’s a reason why Bruce added a chorus only to “Unsatisfied Heart,” and it’s as simple and deadly serious as:

Can you live with an unsatisfied heart?

We never learn the singer’s secret, either in “Fugitive’s Dream” or in “Unsatisfied Heart,” although it’s strongly implied in the latter 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

In “Fugitive’s Dream” it’s implied that the secret is more sinister, and while that song ends on a similar reflective scene, its imagery is darker and lonelier.

In a sense, “Fugitive’s Dream” 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 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 remains in the vault. Bruce has never performed it or released it, but shockingly it did turn up–once–in a War on Drugs setlist earlier this year, proving that band’s boss bonafides and seriously impressing Bruce fans who caught the bands’ performance in person or on youtube.

Unsatisfied Heart
Recorded: March-April 1983 (demo)
Never released
Never performed

Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index. New entries every week!