Avril Lavigne -- "Wish You Were Here"

Pop-rocker Avril Lavigne strikes another hit with fans with “Wish You Were Here,” displaying her vulnerability in the new music video.

Hailing from Ontario, Canada, the extremely successful singer/songwriter has been associated with the music business since her mid-teens and debuted her first album when she was 17 years old. By 2009, over 16 million copies had been sold worldwide. Since then, the now-26-year-old Avril has become one of the top-selling artists releasing albums in the U.S—a  has now released her fourth studio album Goodbye Lullaby, the third single off of which is the edgy ballad “Wish You Were Here.”

The video opens with the pop-punk princess lying on the floor of what looks to be an abandoned apartment in a black slip. A few pained lyrics, a quick bit of guitar strumming, and a torched daisy later, Lavigne breaks into the chorus, spouting “damn, damn, damn/ What I’d do to have you here, here, here/ I wish you were here…”

The video continues in this manner as the singer spirals into a mini-breakdown. Looking pleadingly into the camera as the lyrics progress, Avril weeps over her lost man. “Tears are real... no onions!!" tweeted the singer last week. A bathtub mysteriously enters the scene and Lavigne takes a quick dip before strolling morosely around the room and closing the song with a grieved “…I wish you were here.”

Overall the video style for “Wish You Were Here” is simple, with mostly framed-in close-ups of Miss Avril as she performs breathy, yet sincere vocals about a relationship’s untimely end. The video received a lot of attention from fans when it hit the Net last week and mixed reviews from critics. Jody Rosen in Rolling Stone’s magazine called the song a "jangling power ballad” while Mikael Wood from Spin described the video as "former brat-punk princess in dreary woe-is-me mode."

"It's simple but emotional,” said the artist herself. “Raw and real. Stripped down." Fans flocked to see this softer side of the hard, punk-rocker. The music video gained over 10 million views within the first five days of it’s release on the singer’s VEVO channel and became the most watched as well as TOP favorited music video on YouTube last week.

LINKS:

Check out other blogs about the music video—

MTV Buzzworthy Blogs: http://buzzworthy.mtv.com/2011/09/09/avril-lavigne-wish-you-were-here-video/

AOL Music Blog (By Marina Galperina): http://blog.music.aol.com/2011/09/09/avril-lavigne-wish-you-were-here-video/