Songfacts®:

• Stabbing Westward made a name for themselves with their major-label debut album Ungod in 1994, but constant touring shredded the marriage of frontman Christopher Hall, who channeled his despair into the lyrics for their next album, Wither Blister Burn & Peel, which hit at the peak of the industrial music era and ended up selling over 500,000 copies in America.
  
  In a Songfacts interview with Hall, he talked about the song. "'Shame' was very much me asking the simple question, 'How can I keep going?,'" said Hall. "I had lost someone – a divorce from my first wife - after we had gone on tour forever and ever. It was just, 'How can I exist without you? How am I supposed to continue to keep living when all I can think about is you and you not being here?' I tend to come back to that theme quite often."
• The video is a rather nefarious take on the song. It stars Clint Curtis as a psychotic ex-boyfriend who was supposed to be institutionalized but is now free and stalking his ex. Their dialog is captioned on the screen so we can follow the storyline.
• Christopher Hall eventually entered into a healthy relationship, but it took a lot of work to get there. His parents got divorced, and he found ways of sabotaging his relationships by getting the other person to break up with him. He also recalls reaching a point where he was with someone for so long they simply got used to each other and stayed together even though they couldn't stand each other. All of this led him to songs like "Shame."