About The Song
“You’re All I Need” is a power ballad by American heavy metal band Mötley Crüe. It was released as the third and final single from the band’s 1987 album Girls, Girls, Girls.
The song peaked at 83 on the Hot 100, and 23 on the UK Singles Chart. Despite the controversy and its lack of chart success, the song is considered one of their best songs.
The song was praised by Jon Bon Jovi as “the best ballad Mötley Crüe have ever written.” When informed of this, Nikki Sixx laughed because of the gruesome meaning behind the song.[citation needed]
As Sixx would later relate in his Heroin Diaries memoir, “You’re All I Need” was inspired by some real-life violent impulses. Convinced his girlfriend at the time had been cheating on him with actor Jack Wagner, who was then enjoying a taste of pop stardom with his hit single “All I Need,” Sixx wrote his own song — then played it for his ex. “I took the cassette over to her apartment and I didn’t say anything. I just had a little cassette player and I just played it for her, and she started crying, and I walked out the door,” he later told Rolling Stone. “I was like, ‘Well now, that’s that.'” However, the rest of the band praised the song and it was recorded for the Girls, Girls, Girls album. In Sixx’s book, The Heroin Diaries, a journal entry states that Tommy Lee was playing the song on the piano, and Sixx wrote the lyrics for the piano part.
Video
Lyrics
The blade of my knife
Faced away from your heart
Those last few nights
It turned and sliced you apart
This love that I tell
Now feels lonely as hell
From this padded prison cell
So many times I said
You’d only be mine
I gave my blood and my tears
And loved you, cyanide
When you took my lips
I took your breath
Sometimes love’s better off dead
You’re all I need
Make you only mine
(I loved you)
So I set you free
I had to take your life
You’re all I need
You’re all I need
And I loved you so
But you didn’t love me
Laid out cold
Now we’re both alone
But killing you
Helped me keep you home
I guess, it was bad
‘Cause love can be sad
But we finally made the news
Tied up smiling
I thought you were happy
Never opened your eyes
I thought you were napping
Well, I got so much to learn
About love in this world
But we finally made the news
You’re all I need
Make you only mine
(I loved you)
So I set you free
I had to take your life
You’re all I need
You’re all I need
And I loved you so
So I put you to sleep
You’re all I need
Make you only mine
(You’re all I need)