Roll of the Dice: Hungry Heart

Written for The Ramones, arranged after The Beach Boys, built around a Four Seasons riff and a Tennyson metaphor, sped up a la Alvin and The Chipmunks, and sporting deceptively dark lyrics, “Hungry Heart” was a longshot candidate for release at all, let alone a lead single.

It became, of course, one of Bruce Springsteen’s biggest hits. Even today, it remains Springsteen’s best-charting single in North America, behind only “Dancing in the Dark.”

As legend has it, the origin of “Hungry Heart” dates back to March 23rd 1979, when Bruce met The Ramones backstage at The Fast Lane in Asbury Park. Bruce had already donated two Top 20 singles (“Because the Night” and “Fire“) within the past year, so Joey Ramone may have only been half-kidding when he asked Bruce to write them a song.

Bruce took Joey seriously, though, and it didn’t take him long to fulfill the request. He told Dave Marsh that he wrote “Hungry Heart” in “a half hour, or ten minutes, real fast.”

In his autobiography, the late Clarence Clemons confirms the burst of inspiration with a bit more color: “We’d been in the studio all day with nothing much to show for it. In fact, we had started to pack up for the day. Bruce goes to take a piss and when he comes back he says, ‘Back in the studio, guys, I think I got something.’ And he sits down and writes the whole thing out without pausing. Boom! Just like that.”

It might have come quickly, but Bruce was likely primed for it. He had already featured the song’s titular metaphor in an early draft of “Stolen Car”…

…and the instantly irresistible piano riff sounds inspired by The Four Seasons’ “Dawn (Go Away).”

The song came together quickly, and by mid-June the band was tackling it enthusiastically in the studio. From the outset, “Hungry Heart” sounded brighter and poppier than anything Springsteen had recorded to date. Listening only to the early instrumental take below, you’d think you were hearing the soundtrack for a summer romance.

Steven Van Zandt agreed, envisioning it as something The Beach Boys might have written. “It just had this groove,” he told Peter Ames Carlin in his 2012 biography of Springsteen. “So I said, ‘Let’s get some extra high harmony on it.'”

Van Zandt recruited Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of The Turtles, who had a #1 hit in 1967 with one of the greatest high-harmony songs of all time, “Happy Together.”

Volman and Kaylan (now performing under the comedy-rock moniker Flo & Eddie) layered Beach Boys-esque vocals onto the E Street Band’s backing track. The influence is unmistakable: compare their “Hungry Heart” backing vocals below…

…with the backgrounds on The Beach Boys’ 1964 opus, “Don’t Worry Baby.”

With a gorgeously bright band performance and nostalgically lush harmonies, “Hungry Heart” sports a sunlit backing track that practically swoons for romantic lyrics.

Bruce had something else in mind.

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back

“Hungry Heart” is indeed about new love, but it’s a love that comes at an inconvenient time–and at a cost.

We meet our narrator as he tells his tale to Jack (that’s us) from a neighboring barstool. The first thing we learn about him is that he abandoned his family with what sounds like blithe callousness. What we don’t yet realize is that he’s speaking metaphorically: his body went back, but his heart was endlessly wandering. He’s deeply unsatisfied but unaware of it; he roams without realizing he’s searching.

Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

Although it’s not the only song on the album to feature a river metaphor, Bruce borrowed this particular one from one of Bob Dylan’s cocktail napkins.

Dylan scrawled “The river flows, it flows to the sea/Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be”  and handed it to Peter Fonda, who gave it to Roger McGuinn, who developed it into the title song for Fonda’s 1969 film, Easy Rider.

“The Ballad of Easy Rider” clearly informed “Hungry Heart.” (Bruce even covered it once during the River Tour in 1981.) But while McGuinn’s narrator is a blank slate with no ties to bind him, Bruce’s character is anchored by commitment and obligation. He’s restless, though, and like Dylan’s river, he feels pulled… somewhere.

Everybody’s got a hungry heart
Everybody’s got a hungry heart
Lay down your money and you play your part
Everybody’s got a hungry heart

The phrase hungry heart was coined by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his 1842 epic poem Ulysses, a tale about growing old but refusing to surrender to unhappiness, restlessness, and monotony. Bruce’s use of it in the chorus is our first clue to his narrator’s motivation.

The second verse lays it bare.

I met her in a Kingstown bar
We fell in love I knew it had to end
We took what we had and we ripped it apart
Now here I am down in Kingstown again

He hasn’t wandered very far. Kingstown is only about a ninety-minute drive from Baltimore, but it’s far enough to provide a temporary escape. He stops at the right bar at the right time, and unexpectedly meets and falls for a woman who rouses his restless heart.

She’s married, too–or at least in a committed relationship–but the heart wants what the heart wants. Our lovers return home to break up with their partners, and now our narrator waits with anticipation for his paramour at the place where they first met.

Perhaps sensing Jack’s judgment, our protagonist defends his actions in the final verse:

Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
Don’t make no difference what nobody says
Ain’t nobody like to be alone

Everyone wants a home. We all want stability. But nobody wants to feel alone. That’s the crux of the song: What do you do when your sense of security requires the sacrifice of love?

What’s more important, Bruce asks: comfort or happiness?

At one point or another, he argues, we either pay the cost to feed our hearts or we choose to go hungry.

Our narrator has made his choice. He’s put his own happiness first, la-la-la-ing into the sunset. There’s no indication that a happy ending is on the horizon, though, or even a happy present. We’re left to wonder how his abandoned family feels about his choice. And where exactly is the woman he gave them up for? Will she meet him at the bar or leave him hanging?

There’s no resolution here, no tying of loose ends, because that’s not what “Hungry Heart” is about. This is a song about choices, about self-advocacy, about championing one’s own happiness no matter the risk or the cost–because if we won’t, who will?

Despite its heavy lyrics, Springsteen thought his finished song sounded too bright and poppy, and he almost dismissed it from consideration for The River. Volman and Kaylan were dubious as well: “I felt it wasn’t going to work,” Kaylan revealed in a 2013 Record Collector interview. “We’d heard the songs that would comprise The River and didn’t think this song would fit at all. We just felt he was wasting his time and it was a throwaway bullshit B-side.”

The band was united in their support of the song, though. More importantly, so was Bruce’s manager and adviser. “I played it for Jon Landau,” Bruce wrote in the liner notes to Greatest Hits, “and earning his money, he advised me to keep it.”

There was a problem, though: the song sounded too slow, and Bruce’s voice sounded a bit too gruff for such a smooth track. Bob Clearmountain had already slightly sped up the original recording, but it wasn’t enough.

Chuck Plotkin took Clearmountain’s mix and accelerated it even more. “I got it all the way up until the voice started to just Mickey Mouse out on you,” Plotkin recalled to Brian Hiatt in Stories Behind the Songs. “We found it couldn’t go even a smidge faster than it ended up.”

It was enough. Although Bruce’s voice is almost unrecognizable on the studio track, it became an instant hit when it was released as the first single from The River on October 21, 1980, peaking at #5 on the Hot 100 before the year was out.

Oddly (considering it was the lead single), “Hungry Heart” was one of the last songs from The River to debut in concert, making its first appearance more than two weeks into the tour. When he finally premiered it, he introduced it as a song about “when you meet somebody, fall in love with them, and you say this is gonna be forever. And then forever sort of goes by… and for some reason it ain’t.”

That first performance was from October 18, 1980, one day after the album’s release and three days before the single. While the crowd responds politely, they are clearly unfamiliar with the song, and Bruce himself sounds awkward, unsure of how to infuse the song with the proper energy.

As October gave way to November, Bruce grew more comfortable with the song on stage, and by the time the band reached Tempe, “Hungry Heart” was sounding more confident and sported its now-familiar ending. The introduction, however, was still missing something.

As it turned out, the essential element would come two weeks later, and it wouldn’t come from the stage. By November 20th, “Hungry Heart” was already Bruce’s best-selling single and the first to crack the Top 10. In concert, polite attention had evolved into eager anticipation. The audience reception escalated each night until finally his Chicago audience proved unable to wait for him to start singing.

Paul Rappaport, former VP of Columbia Records, was there that night and shared his recollection in a 2016 blog post.

I was lucky enough to be at the Rosemont Theater show in Chicago the very first time the crowd sang the lyrics back to Bruce. It came as a total shock, but in the nicest of ways. The record was in the process of becoming a hit on top 40 radio. This was brand new territory for Bruce and it meant more new fans and those fans coming to a show with that specific song in their heads that they’d heard over an over again on their local top 40 radio station.

The band started the intro and as Bruce put the mic up to his mouth before he could get the first words out the audience started singing! Bruce had never experienced anything like that before and his eyes nearly popped out of his head with amazement.  He looked back at the band like, “What??!!  Can you believe this?!!! Then he looked at Landau and us in the wings with the same astonished face, which quickly turned into a huge smile.

Then he realized he had to sing the song himself after the audience had finished the first verse.  It was funny watching him make a quick decision—do I just start singing the second verse or do I re-start the song from the beginning and repeat the first verse? Well, he chose the latter and he’s been doing it that way ever since. He was pumped beyond belief and it was the best time I’ve ever heard him sing “Hungry Heart”—a total artist and audience bonding—a euphoric and shared love fest.

“We had a hit,” Springsteen recalled in his autobiography. “A real one. ‘Hungry Heart’ went top ten, doubled our album sales and brought to our live shows… women. Thank you, Jesus! Up ’til now, I’d had a hard-core following of young men who made up a high percentage of our live audience, but ‘Hungry Heart’ brought in the girls and proved Top 40 radio’s power to transform your audience.”

Ironically, a song about the inability to sustain a relationship became a song guaranteed to bring fans and artist together in unison even decades later. “Hungry Heart” has appeared in every tour with the exception of Vote for Change and Bruce’s 1995-97 solo outing. It’s a reliably consistent crowd-pleaser, especially in recent years when Bruce made nightly crowd-surfing forays into the pit.

For as long as Bruce continues to tour, his audiences will keep singing that first verse to him. If anyone had any reason to dislike “Hungry Heart,” perhaps it was the band for whom the song was originally promised–but even the late Joey Ramone couldn’t hold a grudge.

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Bonus #1: Springsteen has performed “Hungry Heart” well over 700 times over the years, but only three of those were acoustic–and two of those were team-ups. The first was in 1986, when Bruce was joined by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit.

…and the second was with Wolfgang Niedecken in Berlin in 2005.

Believe it or not, though, the first time Bruce played an acoustic “Hungry Heart” in public by himself was only a year ago, at Stand Up for Heroes in November 2021. (Delicate ears might want to skip past the opening joke.)

Bonus #2: If you listened to that 2005 clip above and wondered “Wolfgang who?” there’s a reason why Bruce chose that song for that occasion.

In one of his stranger career moves, Bruce decided to shoot an official video for “Hungry Heart” fifteen years after it was released as a single. Stranger still, instead of recording it with the E Street Band, he joined German rocker and friend Wolfgang Niedecken’s Leopardefellband instead.

Now all of that would have been odd enough, but in the actual released video, Bruce decided not to use any of the German band’s backing track. Instead, he reverted to the original E Street Band backing track. So now the official video for “Hungry Heart” has Bruce’s 1995 vocals layered on top of the 1980 E Street Band, all while Wolfgang and his band rock out silently on screen before an audience of lucky radio listeners who heard the open call for a free mini-concert earlier that day.

Bruce released that version as an official single that year, too. What made him decide to record and release such an odd amalgam of a fifteen-year-old song? Who knows, and maybe that’s the point: when you’re feeling bored and restless, sometimes you just need to follow your heart.

Hungry Heart
Recorded: June 14-21, 1979
Released: The River (1980), Greatest Hits (1995), The Ties That Bind: The River Collection (2015)
First performed: October 18, 1980 (St. Louis, MO)
Last performed: April 7, 2023 (Baltimore, MD)

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