‘Everybody Hurts’ was originally written by drummer Bill Berry. With only an acoustic guitar and a drum machine, Berry showed his bandmates the early draft of the song with a deliberate lack of polish. Berry wanted to make sure that the song straddled the line between natural playing and more synthetic sonic textures. “Mike (Stipe) and I cut it live with this dumb drum machine which is just as wooden as you can get,” Berry told Pulse in 1992. “We wanted to get this flow around that: human and non-human at the same time.”
“Bill brought it in, and it was a one-minute long country-and-western song,” Peter Buck observed in the liner notes to Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011. “It didn’t have a chorus or a bridge. It had the verse… it kind of went around and around, and he was strumming it. We went through about four different ideas and how to approach it and eventually came to that Stax, Otis Redding, ‘Pain in My Heart’ kind of vibe. I’m not sure if Michael would have copped that reference, but to a lot of our fans, it was a Staxxy-type thing. It took us forever to figure out the arrangement and who was going to play what, and then Bill ended up not playing on the original track. It was me and Mike and a drum machine. And then we all overdubbed.”
Berry eventually got his live acoustic drums on the final album version. ‘Everybody Hurts’ was a critical and commercial success when it was first released as a single in 1993, but once the internet came into its own, the song quickly became a shorthand for a more comedic take on depression and sadness. Still, ‘Everybody Hurts’ remained pure for R.E.M., especially as they received responses from fans who connected with the song’s hopeful message.
“It saved a few. People have told me. And I love hearing that,” Stipe later told Mojo. “That’s for me, that’s my Oscar, that’s my gold on a shelf right there… that something we did impacted someone’s life in such a profound way. That’s a beautiful thing.”
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