I heard this song on the radio late one night, and it was like a light-bulb.
In my first term at university, I was wracked with absolute gut-wrenching homesickness. On one occasion as I took the funeral of a suicide, we played this as part of some reflective prayer and the whole congregation, including me and the funeral director, were in tears. At funerals I would normally expect to be able to rein in my emotions, but this song will always cause a tear to flow. This echoes what Buck told the BBC in 2005: "The song belongs more to the people that it's aimed at than it does to the band any more."Īdd your comments on this story, using the form below. However, the point of next week's release is not faithfulness to the REM original, it's something more commonly associated with Mr Cowell - that is money, in this case for Haiti.Īs for REM, Stipe says: "How could we not say yes to this appeal? We're honoured to play even a small role in trying to help." The charity-single template is, of course, very different to this, and Simon Cowell, the organiser of the new version, is not usually associated with musical restraint. An earlier version included the line: "Everybody hurts, even the singer of the song."
Based on a beat from a drum machine that cost $20, the track revolves around a few familiar arpeggiated chords.Įven after the arrival of the strings, arranged by former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, there's an intimacy that fits the lyric, and a vocal from Stipe that, in the words of rock critic Garry Mulholland, expresses "all the personal tragedies and troughs that he has travelled through". Buck told Mojo magazine that "trying to reach a 17-year-old and say, 'it's OK - things are tough but they get better'" involved economy and directness - and that universality automatically means the song is picked up on by other people. Is it incongruous, then, to apply the lyric to Haitians affected by an earthquake? It's also, to many, a metaphor for taking one's life. "The only metaphor is in the bridge: 'throw your hand', which is a card-game metaphor." "I remember Michael saying something to the effect that he wanted younger people to not have to worry about metaphors," he said. In the same interview (see link on right), Stipe is characteristically evasive, but Buck is more forthcoming.
"We've tended to license the song out for free to charity," guitarist Peter Buck told the BBC in 2005. In 2001, the Nevada Assembly passed a resolution praising REM for "encouraging the prevention of teen suicides", specifically mentioning Everybody Hurts.Īnd in 1995, the Samaritans marked the first anniversary of the suicide of Kurt Cobain with adverts in music magazines which consisted of two verses of the song. Among them is a teenager staring out of a window, thinking: "They're going to miss me."Īnd suicide - especially among the young - is the personal problem with which Everybody Hurts is most often associated.
In the 1993 video, Stipe is portrayed among drivers stuck in an almighty Texas traffic jam, each with troubles on his or her mind, all of these conveyed in subtitles. And the track rubbed shoulders with Candle In The Wind and I'll Be Missing You on the official Diana Memorial album.īut the troubles that the song originally speaks to are more personal. A version edited to include the sounds of the attacks on the Twin Towers was widely circulated online in late 2001. It was, for example, the first song played by Radio 1 after the two minutes' silence to mark 1996's Dunblane shootings. More importantly, it's immediately obvious what they mean: don't give up.Īnd so the song has had a much more varied and exposed life than most of REM's output, even before the imminent celeb-carousel rendition.
For one thing, you can make out all of singer-songwriter Michael Stipe's words. It started out as a song to comfort "younger people", and the attempt to make it accessible to someone "who hasn't been to college" has made it applicable in all kinds of situations.Įverybody Hurts is not a typical REM song. But what is the original song about, and why is it associated with suicide? Stars including Kylie Minogue, Take That and Mariah Carey are recording REM's Everybody Hurts as a charity single for Haiti.