Your Love Alone Is Not Enough

He left out the line Nicky sings "I could have written all your lines." That line haunts me.

Sean has written a lot more of the music with James this time around. And I wrote half of the music for the first single, Your Love Alone Is Not Enough, which features Nina Persson of The Cardigans, who I think are one of the great underrated bands and I love her voice. It's a complicated lyric. What it's trying to say on one level is that any single element is never enough for a country to survive. You can't solely have religion, or love, or democracy. We need all these elements for any country to be coherent. It is also about people and specifically, suicide. There are just too many people I've known who have killed themselves. James was like, "Great. Another fucking song about suicide! I thought you did all that on your solo album?" I guess people will assume it is about Richey too. He was in a successful band, he could have had a nice girlfriend if he wanted, and we all loved him. But it wasn't enough. Whether its suicide or not, obviously, we don't know. But there's a line in there: "I could have seen for miles and miles/I could've shown you how to smile/I could've shown you how to cry" it's just that feeling of regret. Could someone have done more?

Nicky Wire

'A great song is when you have the courage to turn something sad into a happy, poppy song' - Bono

So true in this case.

The line "I could have written all your lines" means waterfalls for me. It's the most heartbreaking thing in music history I guess. In Manic history at least.

As others have said, the song is indeed about suicide. The title of the song was the last line of a suicide note left by a friend of someone close to the band.

Cool song! I read that this song is about suicide...Sounds about right to me

This song is an imagined conversation between two lovers, which leads to one's suicide, as the other person's love is not enough to save them

I love it when such sad songs become such wonderful pop songs.

I like to think of it as a general statement about belief in general. Love alone is not enough....whether it be romantic love, patriotism, religion, friendship, anything. Life is a lot more complex than just love, and "love" is such a vague, nebulous word to begin with.

democracy is a word that means every thing and nothing

loves