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Boasting Michael Stipe’s most direct, accessible lyric over a simple waltz-like melody courtesy of drummer Bill Berry, “Everybody Hurts” became something of an anthem for the disillusioned, disenchanted youth of the mid-Nineties. Released just before the death of Kurt Cobain and the

Michael Stipe Song facts

Composer
REM

Genre
Rock

Album
Automatic For The People

Year of Release
1993

UK Chart Position
7 disappearance of The Manic Street Preachers’ Richey Edwards, the song soon took on a wider significance, with people associating it with the briefly popular ‘cult of despair’. It’s not hard to see why – nor is it surprising that the track was subsequently used in an advert for The Samaritans, and in countless campaigns for charity appeals. Stipe had never before sounded so honest, lyrically, as he for once refused to hide behind allegory and allusion and instead told the truth: we all suffer pain, sometimes, but we all get over it. Stipe himself says he can no longer claim “Everybody Hurts” as his own, as he feels it belongs to the world at large. It’s a nice sentiment, and one which sums up the way many people feel about a song which touches a universal nerve.

Peter Buck & Michael Stipe talk about writing "Everybody Hurts"

Michael Stipe

Michael Stipe remembers, or forgets: "I remember wanting to write the song . . . but never actually writing it . . . or singing it."
 
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The Corrs

  The Corrs let themselves go

This song has the ability to move me more than any other

Jane
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