Everybody Hurts

Berry wrote much of the original, but a Univox drum machine replaces his drums, and he sampled the pattern. Buck, Mills and the drum machine cut the basic track, and John Paul Jones wrote the strings. It came out as a UK single on April 5, 1993, and in Australia on May 23. Buck said in the liner notes of In Time that the lyrics are straightforward because they were aimed at teenagers, and he cited Stax and Otis Redding soul as an influence. Stipe told Rick Rubin in 2022 that it was inspired by Nazareth's cover of Love Hurts.

It reached No. 29 on the Hot 100, No. 7 in the UK, No. 3 in France, No. 6 in Australia and No. 8 in Canada, and was No. 1 on UK airplay. Jake Scott shot the video in February 1993 along Interstate 10 in San Antonio, inspired by the opening of Fellini's 8 1/2. It won a Billboard Music Video Award in 1994.

Buck recalled that Berry brought in a one-minute country-and-western song with no chorus or bridge, and that after about four different approaches the band settled on a Stax and Otis Redding feel. Stipe had meant to have Patti Smith sing a second vocal, but it did not work out. Melody Maker made it Single of the Week and called it a Let It Be or Candle in the Wind for its generation. Q ranked it No. 31 in its list of the 1001 best songs ever in 2003.

Covers

Patti Smith recorded it as a bonus track on Twelve in 2007. In February 2010 a Helping Haiti charity version, produced by Steve Robson and John Shanks, spent two weeks at No. 1 in the UK.

The video and the Samaritans

In the video the band is stuck in a traffic jam on the double-deck stretch of I-10 in downtown San Antonio, with subtitles showing the thoughts of the drivers in the other cars. Two of the subtitle lines quote Psalms 61 and 126. In 1995 the Samaritans ran a UK press campaign made up only of the song's lyrics and the charity's hotline number.