When Huey Lewis and the News released Sports in 1983, few could have predicted the album would become one of the defining records of the decade.
Powered by hits like “Heart and Soul,” “I Want a New Drug,” “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” and “If This Is It,” the album eventually sold more than 10 million copies in the United States alone. Two years later, “The Power of Love” helped turn Back to the Future into a cultural phenomenon, cementing Huey Lewis as one of the most recognizable stars of the MTV era.
As Lewis celebrates his 76th birthday on July 5, it’s a fitting time to look back at a career that was built on craftsmanship, perseverance and an unmistakable voice that never quite received the critical acclaim it deserved.
Long before he topped the charts, Lewis was hitchhiking across Europe with little more than a harmonica. He busked on street corners in Spain, earning enough money to continue traveling, and later recalled learning to play while waiting for rides across America.
Music wasn’t originally the obvious career path. Lewis earned a perfect 800 on the math portion of his SAT, attended Cornell University as an engineering student and excelled as a baseball player. But college couldn’t compete with the pull of music. He eventually left Cornell and returned to California because, as he later told the San Francisco Chronicle, “it was all happening” there.
His first major band, Clover, found only modest success, though it led to memorable collaborations with artists like Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello. Lewis later joked in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone that on Costello’s debut album, “All the harmonica that isn’t on the Elvis Costello record was played by me.”
‘Sports’ Changed Everything
By the early 1980s, Huey Lewis and the News had already released two albums, but the future was uncertain.
“We knew we had to have a hit,” Lewis told Rolling Stone. “There was only one avenue to success, and that was to have a hit record.”
That urgency shaped Sports. Lewis said the band wanted to blend classic R&B influences with modern production, explaining, “Our style was to take something old and make it modern.”
The gamble paid off. Sports produced four Top 10 singles, reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and became one of the best-selling albums of the 1980s. It transformed the band into arena headliners and made Lewis one of the decade’s biggest stars.
‘Back to the Future’ Took Things to Another Level
Lewis’s career was catapulted into the stratosphere in 1985 when filmmakers approached him about contributing music to a new movie centered around a teenager whose favorite band was Huey Lewis and the News.
That film was Back to the Future and it introduced millions to “The Power of Love,” which became Lewis’s first No. 1 hit. He also wrote “Back in Time” for the film and made a memorable cameo as the school official who rejects Marty McFly’s band by declaring they are “just too darn loud.”
Looking back, Lewis recalled being flattered when director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steven Spielberg explained that Marty McFly’s favorite band would be Huey Lewis and the News.
Facing Life’s Toughest Challenge
In 2018, Lewis announced that he had been diagnosed with Ménière’s disease and could no longer hear well enough to perform.
“I was virtually deaf for two months,” he told Relix in 2020. “It was unbelievable, horrible.”
Rather than shelving the songs the band had already recorded, they released the EP Weather.
“We’re particularly proud of these seven,” Lewis said. “We thought, ‘Why not share them with our fans?'”
Lewis has remained candid about the realities of hearing loss. Although a cochlear implant later restored enough hearing for conversation, he has acknowledged that he is unlikely to perform music ever again.
Still, his legacy has only grown. From his 2025 induction into the People’s Music Hall of Fame to the Broadway musical The Heart of Rock and Roll, the songs he helped create continue to find new audiences.
On his 76th birthday, it’s worth remembering that while Huey Lewis may never have been critics’ favorite frontman, he became something arguably more important: the voice behind some of the most joyful, enduring and instantly memorable songs of the rock era.
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