Know Your Music Video History: Every Avenue’s ‘Tell Me I’m a Wreck’

In the video for “Tell Me I’m a Wreck,” images of Every Avenue performing are intercut with images of people overlayed with text giving away thoughts and secrets about love and relationships. It’s almost implying that we’re reading their minds, that these are the ideas you might not be able to vocalize about love, loss and everything that comes between.

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Which is a great idea and I thought worked really well with the song. But for the hell of it, let’s look back at other music videos that have played around with really similar concepts:

All American Rejects, “Dirty Little Secret”

AAR used the concept of Post Secret for this video, showing anonymous confessions from people as written and drawn on post cards. While not all of the secrets are related to relationships, there’s a few that have snuck in there.

REM, “Everybody Hurts”

In this classic video, we’re able to see everyone’s thoughts on screen as they sit in a car jam and we discover that, inside, everybody hurts. Sometimes.

Vertical Horizon, “Everything You Want”

In this video, words of wisdom seem to appear randomly in the environment the band is walking through. Most importantly? “Every six seconds you think about sex.”

OF COURSE, Vertical Horizon’s video comes across as a bit of an homage to another video by a group with the initials VH…

Van Halen “Right Now”

Considered one of the most definitive music videos in history, it won Video of The Year at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. You know, when they PLAYED music videos…

Of course, if you prefer the Anime Music Video version…

AMV – Various – Van Halen – Right Now Deathcom (Wayne) | MySpace Video

So, Every Avenue, thank you for saluting your music video history!