"Hearts of Stone" has been called "the best album Bruce Springsteen never recorded", which is not quite accurate. Springsteen did pen the title track and the radio-friendly "Talk To Me", and is credited along with Southside Johnny Lyon and Steve Van Zandt on "Trapped Again", but Van Zandt takes solo credit for the remaining six tracks. More to the point, this record pointed the way to the kind of music the reincarnated "Little Steven" would begin making in the early 1980s. Van Zandt asked photographer Frank Stefanko to shoot the album cover art, after meeting during Springsteen's "Darkness on the Edge of Town".