frontman Michael Stipe “loved” Scott’s written treatment, so Scott flew out to the band’s home base of Athens. Maybe I could do something like that.’ So, I like to call it an homage to Fellini, that.” “And I thought, ‘Oh, there's that scene at the beginning of Fellini’s 8 ½ where gets out the car and has this dream sequence. And I started to do a connect-the-dots kind of thing,” Scott continues. “And then as I was driving to Joshua Tree through Riverside and everything, I listened to it over and over again. And as I was listening to the track, I suddenly realized that the tempo suited that slow roll of traffic, right? That was really the spark. It was solid traffic, going out on a Friday night. And on the way there, I was stuck in traffic under this intersection of freeway overpasses that goes out towards San Bernardino on the 10 … that Spaghetti Junction kind of thing.

“I was living in Los Angeles, and I drove out that Friday night with a tape of it I put it in the tape deck and drove out to Joshua Tree, which is a place I love. “This track just really got hold of me - took hold of me,” Scott recalls. Scott went on to direct iconic music videos for Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Tori Amos, U2, Live, Soundgarden, Tina Turner, Oasis, and the Strokes, but it all really started with “Everybody Hurts” and a long, bumper-to-bumper drive through the California desert - a road that figuratively led Scott from Joshua Tree to Federico Fellini’s Rome to, finally, Athens and San Antonio.

In the latter prestigious and especially competitive VMAs category, it even beat out the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” (directed by Spike Jonze), Björk’s “Human Behaviour” (directed by Michel Gondry), Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” (Mark Romanek), and Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” (directed by Tarsem, who’d been the darling of the VMAs two years earlier with another R.E.M.

A classic from the 1990s’ golden age of MTV, the clip that Scott eventually directed for “Everybody Hurts” - which was filmed in November 1992 and came out exactly 30 years ago, in April 1993 - was nominated for a Grammy and won four Moonmen, including Best Direction and Breakthrough Video, at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Everybody hurts piano