"Hungry Eyes" is a song performed by American musician Eric Carmen, a former member of the bandRaspberries, and was featured in the film Dirty Dancing. The song was recorded at Beachwood Studios in Beachwood, Ohio in 1987. "Hungry Eyes" peaked at #4 on the BillboardHot 100 chart and #3 on the Cash BoxTop 100 in 1988. The power ballad was not released commercially in the UK, but it managed to peak at #82 in January 1988, having charted purely on import sales. Songwriters Franke Previte and John DeNicola wrote the song, as well as another hit from the Dirty Dancingsoundtrack, " The Time of My Life". John DeNicola revamped "Hungry Eyes" for his debut album "The Why Because" released October 2019. "Explaining his version, DeNicola says, "I thought it would be fun to record 'Hungry Eyes' in a way that would set it apart from the Dirty Dancing version and decided to try to make it sound like a modern indie-rock band imitating an 80's synth-pop song." The music video featured Carmen with model Sally Steele, who later founded Vegas Rocks! Magazine.
Background
Eric Carmen, the performer of "Hungry Eyes", had been the vocalist of the Raspberries. Carmen released his first solo albumEric Carmen, which contained the worldwide hit with "All By Myself". "Hungry Eyes" was his biggest hit and was written in 1984 by John DeNicola and Franke Previte. It was originally recorded by Previte's band, Frankie and The Knockouts for their album Makin' the Point. Jimmy Ienner, the producer of Carmen's band from his early career, The Raspberries, asked him to sing this song for the Dirty Dancing album because he was familiar with Carmen's musical style. Carmen was hesitant to produce a song for another film sound track because he believed that soundtrack music had "horrible deaths", but Carmen recorded a very popular song that can still be heard on radio stations and TV commercials.
Releases
The song was released commercially on 7" vinyl in many countries; plus, a 3-track 12" maxi single and 2-track cassette were produced. CD singles were a relatively new format; however, a 2-track Japanese mini CD single was commercially released in 1988.
In 2004, British dance groupEyeopener covered "Hungry Eyes". Their house version reached #16 in the UK and #25 in Ireland. The song was their second of four singles with "Eyes" as the last word in the title. A reworked version with altered lyrics by James Radford appears in a 2017 commercial for Shebacat food in the UK. Greyson Chance covered the song in 2017 for the Dirty Dancing remake that was released that same year. The cover was released as a single and also on the film's soundtrack.
