Songfacts®:

• This was written by Holly Knight, Gene Black, and the Wilson sisters of Heart, Ann and Nancy. Knight and Black were in a band called Device and also wrote Rod Stewart's hit "Love Touch."
  
  "Never" is an empowerment song with a very vague storyline but a seriously catchy chorus. Speaking with Songfacts, Knight said: "It feels like that was my theme, and I think it all came out of the fact that I was not going to take s--t from anybody after what I'd been through in the early part of my life."
• This song is built on a refrain that repeats the title four times:
  
  Never
  Never
  Never
  Never run away
  
  Holly Knight considers this part the beginning of the chorus:
  
  We can't go on just running away
  If we stay any longer we will surely never get away
  
  "I write a lot of songs where there is a chorus and then I have the refrain, and for me, the refrain is sometimes the hook of the song and the part that people really latch on to," she said. "That's the part that everybody rallies to."
• Heart was dropped by Epic Records after their 1983 album Passionworks. They signed with Capitol, which teamed them with producer Ron Nevison and insisted they use songs written by outside writers. The plan worked. The Heart album contained three Top 10 hits: "What About Love," "Never" and "These Dreams."
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Nevison, he explained: "They had done an album called Passionworks, and it didn't live up to Epic's expectations. It just didn't have the grit that it needed, so, they dropped them. That's when they got a new manager, Trudy Green, they got a new producer, me, and a new A&R guy at the record company, Don Grierson. And Don told them, 'I'll sign you if we can mutually agree on the producer, and mutually agree on the songs.' That meant that they had to be open to co-writing and outside songs. And I came up with a couple of songs, and Don came up with a song or two, Holly Knight wrote with the girls, and we upped the quality of the songwriting. That's exactly what they needed. They weren't that happy with the fact that they weren't the writers - their egos were bruised by it. But that's kind of what happens."
• The music video got a lot of airplay on MTV and gave the song a huge boost. Directed by Marty Callner, it's a straightforward performance video, but very heavy on Nancy Wilson, even though Ann was the singer. Nancy was deemed the more photogenic of the sisters and featured more heavily in most of their videos of this era. It was a very successful time for the group, but a frustrating one as well because they didn't have the control they were used to.