Hungry Heart was a song written by Bruce Springsteen for The Ramones. But like a river that don’t know where its flowing, he wrote instead recorded it himself. And it became his biggest hit up until then.
Bruce established a style of negativity from Darkness at the Edge of Town, and he never went back. For example, Born in the USA is (unfortunately) about how much it sucks to be born in the USA.
I think he possibly boxed himself in too much with the negativity. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two of his biggest hits, this one and Im On Fire, are both songs he wrote for someone else, that are uncharacteristically positive. (Im on Fire was written for Elvis Presley, who died before he got to hear it.) It don’t matter what nobody says. Everybody likes an upbeat song with a catchy chorus.
Now a bit of (over)-analysis, Jack. The first verse sets of the story with a dynamic AABB rhyming scheme.
Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back
Like a river that don't know where it's flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going
But in the second verse, he ends up in a rut, with a more cyclic ABAB rhyming sceme.
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
In the third verse he seems to lament how things turned out for him:
Everybody needs a place to rest
Everybody wants to have a home
I prefer the Sexton Blake version over the original. It has a more sparse, droning, moody nature. Bruce and the E Street band are great musicians, but I notice that this is the second time a Springsteen cover is featured on Biweekly Song. And neither of them are even the best and most acclaimed Springsteen cover of Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, which similarly makes the song more tight and tense.