Back in August, we debuted a brand new song from Mini Meltdowns—a super group featuring current and former members of Limbeck, Dashboard Confessional, The Promise Ring, The Benjamins, Rx Drugs, and Alligator Gun—and announced details of the project’s first full-band show. With the Nashville-Milwaukee outfit’s excellent sophomore EP, Destined For Disaster, now officially out in the world and Friday’s live debut at X-Ray Arcade on the horizon, Mini Meltdowns decided to pair the music from their brutally honest single, “I Wanna Die,” with animation and innovative visuals that fit the self-referential song’s anguishing overtones.
“I wasn’t very happy with how my life was going when I wrote this song,” Mini Meltdowns bandleader Jon Phillip tells Milwaukee Record. “Even though I consider myself a positive person, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful. But writing this song reminded me that things will get better.”
Director Nick Sommer—who also directed and co-starred in the Meltdowns’ 2018 video for “Number On Me”—spoke to Phillip about his mindset when he wrote the song and used the protagonist’s trapped and dejected feelings as the basis for the “I Wanna Die” video.
“The song is sort of tongue-in-cheek and suicide is such a serious subject, so I wanted to figure out a way to show the idea of ‘I Wanna Die,’ but make sure the audience knows the main character doesn’t actually want to kill himself,” Sommer says. “Playing off the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray kills himself repeatedly until he finally wakes up with the girl of his dreams, our video does the exact opposite.”
Sommer (who stars in the video again) manages to soften the video’s dark motif through the use of illustrations from John Mcguire and visual effects from Dave Keihl, which the director says “help push the dream sequences to a work of imagination.” There’s also some great live footage, some of which was filmed underwater. It’s also worth noting that this video also manages to pick up right where the “Number On Me” video left off.
Even though Phillip, thankfully, says he’s now in a much better emotional state than he was when “I Wanna Die” was written, Milwaukee Record would still like to add that if you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
