Tear Jerker / Manic Street Preachers

This Welsh alternative rock band has some very heartbreaking songs.

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• "4st 7lb" is a graphic account of a girl with anorexia, filled with some of the most heartbreakingly beautiful lyrics Richey Edwards (who struggled with anorexia himself) ever wrote, in particular:
  "I want to walk in the snow and not leave a footprint
  I want to walk in the snow and not soil its purity."
  • The sample of a woman saying, "I eat too much to die and not enough to stay alive. I'm sitting in the middle waiting," at the beginning of the song is taken from the documentary Caraline's Story. Caraline, the woman in question, was severely anorexic and later died of the disease, weighing only 3 and a half stone.
• "The Intense Humming of Evil", naturally - it is a Holocaust song, after all. It is clear that Richey Edwards was deeply impacted by his visit to Auschwitz.
• "Nobody Loved You". A song written by Nicky Wire (bassist/lyricist) about the loss of Richey Edwards (former lyricist/guitarist, now missing). Example lines. "Cherry blossom tree/but at least you are free/Nobody loved you/Like me" can make one tear up.
• Although a live staple before Richey's disappearance, the band's cover of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" for War Child's The Help Album released September 1995 is heartbreaking to listen to knowing it is the first song recorded without Richey, however it is equally heartwarming as the song was therapeutic for the band to continue to record for what would become "Everything Must Go". The final lines "I'm free, nothing's bothering me" is shiver inducing yet show a ray of hope that they are no longer in mourning and feel free to continue.
• A small but noteworthy detail is that the album "Everything Must Go" opens with "Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier" which features the sound of the sea at the very start of the track. Although the song is about the sea front at Blackpool, it's slightly hard to not associate the sound to the disappearance of Richey who was suspected of jumping off the Severn Bridge a year and a few months prior to it's release.
  • As the "What Is Music" podcast put it in their episode covering "Everything Must Go" on their first season "Do You Love Us?", you have got to be very brave and bold to open your album with the sound of the sea and crashing waves with the possibility that your bandmate and best friend for many years may have possibly chosen to end their life by drowning and their body to be lost at sea and to never be seen again.
• As upbeat as "Australia" sounds and it being used as the theme tune to a Children's television series "Renford Rejects", the lyrics are super bleak as it follows Nicky's desire to shut away the outside world following Richey's disappearance as well as his struggle with Gilbert's Syndrome
• "Sepia". A B-Side, also about Richey.
• "Cardiff Afterlife", another one about Richey.
• "William's Last Words" was written by Richey himself, although it is highly debated if the written perspective is from Richey's own point of view (as rumours are he found God whilst in The Priory) or from a character on their death bed. "Leave me go Jesus, I love you yeah I love you, just let me go"... "I'm really tired, I want to go to sleep and wake up happy"... it sounds rather like a suicide note. It's sung by Nicky Wire, who doesn't have a particularly strong voice, but the strained and cracked sound of his singing just makes it hit that much harder.
  • Why's it sung by Nicky? Because James genuinely couldn't will himself to sing something that he considered to be his friend's suicide note.
• "Ocean Spray" was written about James Dean Bradfield's mother's battle with cancer, and his visits to her. The lyrics are all heart-breaking.
• "Life Becoming a Landslide" is about the death of Childhood innocence and the corruption of becoming an adult
• "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next."
• "No Surface, All Feeling" although a song particularly about being jaded by fame, it takes a heart-breaking turn when one discovers that this is the final song that Richey physically worked on with the band and as rumours believe, features the only time Richey plays guitar on a Manics' studio track (although it is debated whether it is the opening riff or the final outro to the song that features Richey's playing)
• The Holy Bible B-side "Too Cold Here" features a heart-breaking lyric from Richey “It’s easier to make love to a stranger than to ask a friend to call” which if you know the band's history around the late Gold Against The Soul/early Holy Bible era, you know this was the time that Richey started to spiral and isolate himself prior to his suicide attempt partly due to members of the Manics' getting in to serious relationships alongside the death of their manager Philip Hall who Richey was close to.
• "Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky."
• "This Is Yesterday" and "Die In The Summertime" from The Holy Bible. Two sister songs side by side with each other with similar themes of nostalgia and regret and longing to return to innocence.
• The music videos to "Rewind The Film" and "Anthem For A Lost Cause".
• Any interview where Nicky Wire is talking about Richey, usually holding back tears.
• "Little Baby Nothing", a hopeless rail against 20th century media misogyny;
  "No god reached me, faded films and loving books
  Black and white TV
  All the world does not exist for me
  And if I'm starving, you can feed me lollipops
  Your diet will crush me
  My life just an old man's memory

  Little baby nothing
  Loveless slavery, lips kissing empty
  Dress your life in loathing
  Breaking your mind with Barbie Doll futility

  Little baby nothing
  Sexually free, made-up to breakup
  Assassinated beauty
  Moths broken up, quenched at last
  The vermin allowed a thought to pass them by

  You are pure, you are snow
  We are the useless sluts that they mould
  Rock 'n' roll is our epiphany
  Culture, alienation, boredom and despair"
• Their cover of "This is the Day" can also become one to longtime fans of the band, especially when combined with the montage video for it.
• 'Still Snowing in Sapporo' calls back to their fateful 1993 tour of Japan, and is heartbreaking for it.
  We put our bodies on the line
  Built a mountain we could never climb
  How could four become so strong
  Yet break and leave too soon, too soon
• 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough', one of their many songs about suicide. In this case, it's about how love can't always save a person and it can't bring them back. Even with the call-backs, shout-outs, and guest vocalists, it's a painful song.