“Dirty Little Secret,” the breakthrough single from the All-American Rejects, is coming to YouTube with a classic live performance. The new clip comes from the band’s Tournado DVD release, which documented their December 2006 performance at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in Saint Paul, Minnesota as part of their Tournado tour, supporting the Move Along album. The performance captures the All-American Rejects with all the power and energy that made them stars over 20 years ago.
“’Dirty Little Secret’ did not start out as the arena-sized power pop song that it became. Originally, it “was just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, that’s all it was. We put off getting the full band in and coming up with the arrangement until the very last second,” guitarist Nick Wheeler once explained to SongFacts. “We were literally less than a week away from going into the studio, and we all four started jamming and tossing out ideas. We had the arrangement down within an hour and that was that. We ended up recording it and couldn’t get the motherf–king thing out of our heads. So it turned out to be a good thing.”
It also turned out to be a major success. “Dirty Little Secret” became the All-American Rejects’ first top-ten single, peaking at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was a success overseas, too, reaching number 13 in Scotland, number 19 on the overall U.K. chart, and charting in both Ireland and Australia. The song also came with a memorable music video, which features people holding up hand-written cards bearing their “dirty little secrets,” which were pulled from a website where people from around the world could submit their own secrets.
The Tournado version of “Dirty Little Secret” comes at the same time as the deluxe rerelease of Move Along, the album from which it’s the lead single. The band’s sophomore album is being released on a variety of formats, including a deluxe 2LP featuring bonus tracks “Kiss Yourself Goodbye,” “Bite Back,” and “Eyelash Wishes.”
Listen to the 21st anniversary deluxe edition of Move Along here.
