Heidi Montag wants everyone to know she has feelings. If you prick her, does she not bleed? And if you compare her warbling on her new single "Higher" to that of a squeak toy swallowed by a rabid raccoon and say her accompanying beach- and bikini-crammed video both sucks and blows, does she not cry?

Yep, she does.

"I just started sobbing uncontrollably," the fame-yearning "Hills" starlet sniffles to Us Weekly. "I cried myself to sleep that first night after my video came out. I just couldn't understand why people I didn't even know felt the need to be so cruel and hurtful toward me."

(See why here. Or better yet, just watch Joel McHale's hilarious take from "The Soup.")

You see, despite her remodeled honker and exponentially increased cup size, "I am just a 21-year-old from a small town in Colorado trying to follow her dreams," she whimpers.

At least Heidi has sometime boyfriend and video mastermind Spencer Pratt to lean on, which she does in a not-at-all-staged photo op showing her looking teary, CD in hand, as he comforts her.

"I just held her and told her it was going to be OK," he helpfully shares. "This is just part of being an artist. If it were easy, everyone would be a pop star."

(Can a Spencer-penned self-help book of life-affirming platitudes of questionable merit be far off? We don't think so.)

Montag, for her part, blames the amateurishness of the video on their lack of wherewithal, whining, "We had other ideas but we couldn't afford them."

Pratt, not surprisingly, believes his stunningly awful sand-and-surf concept speaks for itself: "I don't think I need to defend it -- it's a piece of art."

Next: Quickies: Another Reality Show for Jessica?