Aaron Lee Tasjan Goes Full ‘Teen Wolf’ in Eighties Throwback Video ‘Horror of It All’
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“What, are you dick weasels in a band or something?” Aaron Lee Tasjan definitively answers a bully’s taunting question in the inspired music video for “Horror of It All,” the first release off his upcoming fifth album, Stellar Evolution.
Directed by Curtis Wayne Millard, the video is an Eighties time warp, full of grainy VHS effects, bright neon, and more than a few references to Teen Wolf (the 1985 Michael J. Fox O.G.). Tasjan even does his best “king of the urban surfin’” bit, miming a sure-footed ride atop the roof of a van like Jerry Levine in the movie. By the clips’ end, ALT and his band, including a cameo by Nashville lifer Jon Latham, are battling their inner bullies of doubt and inferiority in a video-game-style throwdown. Naturally, they come out on top: “You’re damn right we’re in a band,” Tasjan, in full wolfman makeup, snarls.
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Despite the video’s playful nature, “Horror of It All” is a poignant recollection of tough times navigating high school’s social caste system. “Teardrops on my dinosaur t-shirt/just a little kid swallowing my pain,” Tasjan sings, “like a piece of spat-out candy/first heartbreak never gonna be the same.”
“When I think of what scares me the most about ‘being myself,’ is that I’ll get rejected for it. This song examines the concepts of both rejection and self-acceptance through metaphors of childhood playground heartbreak and the dramatic nature of the teenage experience,” Tasjan said in a statement. “The story is being told through the eyes of a young queer person. I wanted to use experiences from childhood in the song because I feel like those heartaches are the ones that are truly everlasting. In life, we have to deal with and learn from the heartbreaks of our youth. Those lessons stay with us because the pain of the experience can be processed, but the memory of it happening always remains.”
Stellar Evolution, the follow-up to Tasjan’s superb 2021 LP Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!, arrives April 12 on Blue Élan Records. Co-produced with Gregory Lattimer, the album is a response to anti-LGBTQ legislation enacted in Tasjan’s adopted home state of Tennessee.
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