Songfacts®:

• In this song, Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine is in misery because he's really hung up on a girl, but she's ghosting him. He explained to MTV News: "'Misery' is about the desperation of wanting someone really badly in your life but having it be very difficult. Kind of what all the songs I write are about. I'm not treading on new ground, but I think a lot of people - including myself - deal with that all the time. Relationships are difficult, and it's good therapy to write about them."
• In the video, Adam Levine keeps pursuing the girl, and she keeps trying to kill him, first by just beating him up, but later with artillery. Shot in Los Angeles, it was directed by Joseph Kahn, whose many credits include Gwen Stefani's "The Sweet Escape" and Britney Spears' "Toxic."
  
  "When Joseph wrote the treatment after reading a few sentences, I thought it was really amazing," Levine told MTV News. "It kind of turns the whole idea of the sexual energy between two people - a guy and a girl, a music video, you've seen that a million times - that exists in this video, but it's turning it on its ass and having the girl be the more domineering one who's trying to kill me."
• There are plenty of action sequences in the video, with Levine's bandmates taking lots of collateral damage. This meant that stuntmen were required to double up for the band members in some of the scenes. Levine admitted to MTV News: "I'll tell you a little secret... the stuntmen were so great, but they probably weren't too happy because they had to dress like us, which was hilarious, because we aren't the most masculine dressers. This dude who was [keyboardist] Jesse [Carmichael]'s stunt double was, like, really buff, and he has Jesse's little low-top Converse and skinny jeans on. The shoes were, like, falling off his massive ankles."
  
  Levine added: "I did a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff is me! But most of it wasn't very dangerous. Although, by the end of the day, even not being hit by things is such a physical thing that I was really kind of beat up. I was like, 'Man, even thinking I got my ass kicked feels like getting my ass kicked.'"
• "Misery" was the first single from Maroon 5's third album, Hands All Over. The song stalled at #14 and album didn't do as well as they hoped, falling short of their previous one, It Won't Be Soon Before Long (2007), which contains the #1 hit "Makes Me Wonder."
  
  The band made sure this wasn't a trend by bringing in outside writers and putting together the whistling-enhanced heat-seeking earworm "Moves Like Jagger," which was added to the album as a bonus track in 2011. That song was a #1 hit and led to more collaborations with outside writers, mostly Benny Blanco. Over the next few years they reached new heights with hits like "One More Night" and "Sugar." They also got a boost when Adam Levine took a gig as a judge on The Voice in 2011.
• The girl in the video is the Russian model Anne Vyalitsyna, who was Adam Levine's girlfriend. She also appears in Maroon 5's video for "Never Gonna Leave This Bed," where she's much kinder to Adam. They split up in 2012.
• This song, along with the rest of the Hands All Over album, was produced by Mutt Lange, a legend in the industry who helmed AC/DC's Back in Black and many of Shania Twain's albums (they were married for a while). Lange didn't take a writing credit on the song though; it was written by Adam Levine and his bandmates Jesse Carmichael and Sam Farrar.