The 2010s File Feature
Starving
"Starving" by Hailee Steinfeld and Grey Featuring Zedd: Chart History and Background "Starving" is a pop single by actress and singer Hailee Steinfeld in col…
01 The Story
"Starving" by Hailee Steinfeld and Grey Featuring Zedd: Chart History and Background
"Starving" is a pop single by actress and singer Hailee Steinfeld in collaboration with production duo Grey, featuring additional production and contribution from superstar DJ and producer Zedd. The song was released on July 29, 2016, through Republic Records and Interscope Records, and became the most commercially successful single of Steinfeld's music career, introducing her to pop radio audiences who had known her primarily as the Oscar-nominated actress from the 2010 film True Grit and its subsequent work.
The track was written by Steinfeld alongside Ryan Vojtesak and the members of Grey, with Zedd contributing to the production. Grey, the duo of Michael Trewartha and Kyle Trewartha, had been building a reputation as skilled electronic pop producers, and their collaboration with Steinfeld gave both parties a breakthrough commercial moment. Zedd's attachment to the project brought additional industry credibility and promotional leverage from one of the most bankable names in electronic dance music.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "Starving" peaked at number twelve in the autumn of 2016, becoming Steinfeld's highest-charting single and one of the more durable pop crossover moments of that year. The track maintained a strong chart presence for several months, benefiting from heavy top-40 radio airplay and consistent streaming performance. It also reached high positions on the Pop Songs airplay chart, where it competed successfully with much more established pop acts, a testament to the strength of its hook and production quality.
The song was a genuine crossover success, charting not only on mainstream pop charts but also on the Dance/Electronic Songs chart, where Zedd's association helped drive placement and the track's four-on-the-floor production elements gave it legitimate electronic credibility alongside its pop radio accessibility. This dual-chart performance was relatively unusual for a mainstream pop single and helped extend the track's promotional reach across different audience segments.
Internationally, "Starving" performed strongly in markets with well-developed pop and electronic music crossover audiences. It reached the top five in Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand, the top twenty in the United Kingdom, and charted across Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The international performance confirmed that the track's appeal was not dependent on Steinfeld's name recognition as an actress, as her profile varied considerably across markets.
The music video, directed by Hannah Lux Davis, used a warm, sunlit visual palette and presented Steinfeld in an intimate performance setting intercut with personal vignettes. The video accumulated hundreds of millions of views on YouTube and was praised for its emotional authenticity, particularly given that the song's subject matter, the emotional intensity of falling in love, was presented through Steinfeld's performance with convincing vulnerability rather than pop-star polish.
Critical reception was warm. Reviewers noted that "Starving" succeeded where many young-actress-turned-pop-star crossovers fail: it felt like a genuine artistic choice rather than a calculated career move. The song's melody was strong enough to stand without relying on novelty or manufactured controversy, and Steinfeld's vocal performance was controlled and emotionally present without overreaching into the kind of excess that can undermine a simpler, more direct song.
The song appeared on Steinfeld's extended play Haiz, released in November 2015, with "Starving" added as a subsequent single release that post-dated the original EP. The track was later included in re-releases and streaming compilations associated with her early recording career. It was certified platinum by the RIAA in the United States and reached certification milestones in Australia and the United Kingdom as streaming counts accumulated over subsequent years.
At the Grammy Awards, "Starving" was nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 59th Grammy Awards in 2017, placing it alongside significantly more established acts and representing a meaningful recognition of the track's quality and cultural impact. The nomination was a significant milestone for Steinfeld's music career, suggesting that her transition from acting to pop music was being taken seriously at the industry's highest levels.
"Starving" represented a particular moment in pop music when the boundary between EDM-influenced production and conventional pop songwriting was especially porous. The mid-2010s had seen a wave of EDM-pop crossovers driven by producers like Zedd, David Guetta, and Calvin Harris working with pop vocalists, and "Starving" was among the more successful examples of this format, achieving genuine emotional resonance alongside its commercial efficiency. It remains a key marker in both Steinfeld's artistic career and in the broader story of that pop music moment.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of "Starving" by Hailee Steinfeld and Grey
"Starving" by Hailee Steinfeld and Grey is a song about the particular kind of emotional and physical hunger that accompanies new love, the overwhelming desire for another person that makes everything previously felt seem insufficient by comparison. The central metaphor of hunger and starvation is used to describe the state of falling deeply in love: the feeling that you were not fully alive or nourished before this person arrived, that their presence reveals a deficit you had not previously recognized.
The song explores what might be called the revelatory quality of attraction: the experience in which a new love does not simply add something to life but retroactively changes how life before that love is perceived. The "starving" of the title is not simple romantic longing; it is the recognition, once love has arrived, that a kind of deprivation was present all along. This is a more philosophically interesting emotional position than straightforward desire, and it is part of what gives the song its distinctive emotional weight despite its apparently simple pop structure.
Steinfeld's delivery of these themes is notably personal and unguarded for a mainstream pop track. There is a vulnerability in her vocal performance that suggests the singer is not simply presenting a generic romantic scenario but genuinely inhabiting a specific emotional experience. This quality, which reviewers frequently noted in their assessments of the song, helped distinguish "Starving" from more formulaic pop-EDM crossover productions of the same period, where emotional content was often subordinated to production spectacle.
The production by Grey and Zedd supports the song's emotional content rather than overwhelming it. The track builds from an intimate, almost sparse beginning into a more expansive, euphoric chorus that mirrors the emotional experience the song describes: the way romantic feeling expands to fill available space, becoming larger and more consuming as it develops. This structural decision, building toward release rather than opening at full intensity, gives the song a shape that reflects its thematic arc.
For Steinfeld specifically, "Starving" carried additional meaning as a declaration of creative identity. She had spent years establishing herself as a serious actress, and the move into pop music could easily have been read as a commercial calculation rather than a genuine artistic expression. The emotional specificity and apparent sincerity of "Starving" worked against that reading, presenting a young artist who was using music to explore and express something real rather than simply extending her brand into a new commercial category.
The Grammy nomination for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance that "Starving" received in 2017 suggested that the industry recognized this quality. It is relatively unusual for a debut or near-debut pop single to earn Grammy recognition, and the nomination implied that "Starving" had achieved something beyond commercial formula: it had made an emotional impression strong enough to be taken seriously by industry peers.
Culturally, the song arrived at a moment when EDM-pop crossovers were at peak commercial saturation, and many of the most successful examples of the genre were criticized for prioritizing production gloss over emotional substance. "Starving" offered a counter-example: a track where the electronic production elements served the song's emotional logic rather than replacing it, where the feeling came first and the production amplified rather than generated it. That balance is harder to achieve than it appears, and its successful execution here is central to why the song connected with audiences as deeply and durably as it did.
The song's lasting resonance, audible in continued streaming figures years after its initial release, suggests that its emotional territory, the experience of recognizing how deeply one needs another person, remains perpetually relevant to audiences navigating the experience of falling in love for the first time or the tenth time. The metaphor of starvation is a deliberately arresting choice precisely because it describes deprivation that was not consciously felt until it was ended. That is the most accurate description of what falling in love can feel like: not the arrival of something new, but the revelation that something essential was always missing.
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