Bay Area rock trio Sour Widows have shared the music video for the second single from their much-anticipated Crossing Over EP, coming April 23 via Exploding in Sound Records. Paste premiered the EP’s lead and title track “Crossing Over” in March, and we hailed it as one of the month’s best tracks.
Maia Sinaiko, Susanna Thomson and Max Edelman make up Sour Widows, but “Bathroom Stall” is Sinaiko’s show, a haunting blend of imagination and memory accompanied by sparing guitars and hi-hat sizzle. Sinaiko’s plaintive vocals paint the picture of inescapable grief, tinged with wonder: “And sometimes I hear you call / From the moon or the roof or a bathroom stall / A place I don’t question,” they sing to the lost. The “Bathroom Stall” video, meanwhile, directed, shot and edited by Asher Sinaiko, is powerfully cinematic, interspersed with artful framing and interpretive dance elements. At one point, Sinaiko, Thomson and Edelman’s faces are overlaid in a single shot, as if to suggest Sinaiko isn’t going through all this grief alone. The video’s emotionally explosive conclusion parallels Sinaiko’s go-for-broke vocal performance, following raw pain with hard-won catharsis.
“This song is about a relationship I had with someone who struggled with addiction, who very tragically passed away three years ago while we were together,” Sinaiko explains in a statement. “It’s about some moments we shared, and how it feels to walk around carrying that person and those experiences with me while the world stays normal. I wrote the song because I wanted to preserve and document what happened to me, to write out the scary stuff and just let it sit there forever.”
“I think it’s funny that it’s called ‘Bathroom Stall’ and that it has that image in it; the song goes from heavy and dark to ordinary and totally pedestrian in a sentence, which feels absurd. And that’s kind of what it’s like to grieve,” Sinaiko continues. “That’s kind of what’s hard to explain about grief, how absurd it is. Part of you goes to a different planet and part of you stays walking around like an alien on Earth, going to the bathroom and looking at the moon and shit.”
Watch the “Bathroom Stall” video below. You can preorder Crossing Over right here.
