A punk band asked for a favor. The song that came back was doo-wop with a Four Seasons piano riff and Beach Boys harmonies sung by two guys from the Turtles, and it was too fast, because an engineer had sped up the tape until the vocal was one notch short of a cartoon. It became the first top ten hit of Bruce Springsteen's career, and he almost gave it away.

Springsteen wrote "Hungry Heart" in 1979 after meeting the Ramones in Asbury Park, where Joey Ramone asked him for a song. He wrote it in minutes, and it was so bright and poppy he nearly cut it from The River. Someone told him to keep it: in his own liner notes it was Jon Landau, in his own 2015 telling it was Johnny Ramone. It peaked at number five in December 1980.

The favor

By 1979 Springsteen had a reputation for handing away hits. He had given away two top 20 singles inside a year, "Because the Night," which went to Patti Smith, and "Fire." So when the Ramones crossed paths with him in Asbury Park, asking for a song was not an unreasonable thing to do.

Springsteen told the story himself on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2015. "I saw the Ramones in Asbury Park," he said, and after they talked a while he came away with an assignment: "And we were talking for a while and I was like, 'Man I've got to write the Ramones a song.'"

He did not take his time about it. "So I went home and I sat at my table and I wrote it in about the time it took me to sing it."

That matches what he told biographer Dave Marsh years earlier, that the song took "a half hour, or ten minutes, real fast."

Clarence Clemons, in his own autobiography, put the burst in the middle of a dead studio day: "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... And he sits down and writes the whole thing out without pausing. Boom! Just like that."

Why it did not sound like anything else on The River

The problem with "Hungry Heart" was that it was too good at being a pop song. Set next to the rest of The River, an album largely concerned with marriages closing in and jobs disappearing, it sounded like a summer single.

Steven Van Zandt heard where it wanted to go. "It just had this groove," he told biographer Peter Ames Carlin in 2012. "So I said, 'Let's get some extra high harmony on it.'"

He went and got the real thing. Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, the voices on "Happy Together" and by then performing as Flo and Eddie, came in and layered Beach Boys-style harmonies over the E Street Band's track.

They were not convinced it was worth doing. "I felt it wasn't going to work," Kaylan told Record Collector in 2013. "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..."

The tape speed

The track still had a problem. It sat too slow, and Springsteen's voice sat too rough on top of something that smooth. Bob Clearmountain had already nudged the recording faster. It was not enough.

Chuck Plotkin took the mix and pushed it further, and he has described exactly where he stopped. "I got it all the way up until the voice started to just Mickey Mouse out on you," Plotkin told Brian Hiatt for Bruce Springsteen: The Stories Behind the Songs. "We found it couldn't go even a smidge faster than it ended up."

The famous bright, boyish "Hungry Heart" vocal is a 30-year-old man's voice with the tape run fast, stopped one hair short of a novelty record.

Who told him to keep it, and why the answer changes

Springsteen genuinely considered giving it away or leaving it off. Two versions of the rescue exist, and both come from him.

In the liner notes to his 1995 Greatest Hits, Springsteen wrote: "I played it for Jon Landau, and earning his money, he advised me to keep it." That is the version that has circulated for thirty years, and it fits the pattern. Landau had watched three Springsteen songs become other people's hits and did not want a fourth.

Then in 2015, on Fallon, Springsteen told it a different way, with the veto coming from a Ramone. "I brought it in and we went to make a demo for it or I played it for [Johnny Ramone]," he said, "and he said, 'Nah, you better keep that one.' He was right about that. It did pretty well."

Note that he named Johnny, not Joey, and Joey is the one usually credited with making the request. The two accounts are not strictly incompatible. A band can pass on a song and a manager can then tell you to hang onto it. But the retelling drifts, and the site that pretends otherwise is guessing.

What it became

"Hungry Heart" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 30 on November 8, 1980 and peaked at number five on the chart dated December 27, 1980. It was Springsteen's first top ten single as a performer, seven years and five albums into his recording career.

The lyric is not remotely as sunny as the arrangement. A man leaves a wife and kids in Baltimore and does not come back. When Springsteen finally started playing it live, more than two weeks into the tour, 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."

Audiences did not care. They took the first verse away from him almost immediately and have been singing it back at him ever since.

Bruce Springsteen singing into a microphone during the 1981 River Tour

How the telling has grown over the decades

The drift worth flagging: the identity of the person who saved the song, Landau in the 1995 telling and Johnny Ramone in the 2015 one, and the venue for the original meeting, which different accounts place at the Fast Lane and at Convention Hall. The core of the story, that Springsteen wrote it fast for somebody else and nearly did not keep it, has never wobbled.

The honest bottom line

Everything about this record is a compromise. It was written as a giveaway for a punk band who would have made it unrecognizable, arranged by borrowing another band's sound, sung by two hired voices from a 1967 hit, and then physically sped up until the singer sounded like a younger man. Springsteen thought it was too light for his own album and the harmony singers thought it was a throwaway. All of them were wrong. The song has outlived every doubt attached to it because the joy in the arrangement and the abandonment in the lyric are both true at once, which is the thing a great pop single can do and almost nothing else can. Four years later, Born in the U.S.A. would misread even harder, a protest song adopted as a patriotic anthem, and the album's first single, Dancing in the Dark, would carry the same tension between the joy in the sound and the unease underneath.

FAQ

Did Bruce Springsteen write "Hungry Heart" for the Ramones? Yes. He met the Ramones in Asbury Park in 1979, Joey Ramone asked him for a song, and Springsteen went home and wrote "Hungry Heart" the same night.

Why did Springsteen keep "Hungry Heart" instead of giving it away? He was talked out of giving it up. In his 1995 Greatest Hits liner notes he credits Jon Landau: "I played it for Jon Landau, and earning his money, he advised me to keep it." In a 2015 Tonight Show appearance he credited Johnny Ramone with telling him "Nah, you better keep that one."

Why does Springsteen's voice sound higher on "Hungry Heart"? The tape was sped up. Bob Clearmountain sped up the original recording and Chuck Plotkin pushed it further, stopping just before the vocal started to sound like a cartoon.

Who sings the high harmonies on "Hungry Heart"? Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, performing at the time as Flo and Eddie. Steven Van Zandt brought them in because he heard the song as something the Beach Boys might have made.

How high did "Hungry Heart" chart? Number five on the Billboard Hot 100, on the chart dated December 27, 1980. It was Springsteen's first top ten single as a performer.

What is "Hungry Heart" about? A man who walks out on his wife and children and never returns. Springsteen has introduced it live as a song about a love you swear will be forever, and then forever goes by and it is not.

Sources

Everybody has a hungry heart, ours feeds on sources.

Part of Stories Behind the Songs. See also Dancing in the Dark and Born in the U.S.A..