by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Maia Sinaiko sprained their ankle and spent the day before in the ER. Susanna Thomson is making last minute preparations for the tour that starts in two days. And still, the two songwriters/guitarists of Sour Widows found time to speak to Post-Trash, because, well, Sour Widows is it for them. As they’ll reiterate throughout our conversation, there is no plan B. Sour Widows simply has to work.
The conviction these two best friends share is infectious. Along with drummer Max Edelman and bassist Timmy Stabler, the duo just released their sprawling debut Revival of a Friend on Exploding in Sound Records. The album combines the minimalism of early Pedro the Lion with the knottier moments of Slint as Sinaiko and Thomson’s harmonized vocals float above. It’s both reminiscent of the band’s start seven years ago when Sour Widows played their first show and their evolution into an electrifying live band aided by influential runs with iconic slowcore band Duster.
As the band’s profile has grown, the personal lives of both Sinaiko and Thomson have been scarred by grief. Maia lost a partner to an accidental overdose in 2017 while Susanna lost her mother three years ago. The following interview is about the juxtaposition between grief and faith. It’s about how friendship has carried this charismatic songwriting partnership to lauded new heights while serving as a lifeline both have counted on when everything else turned to shit. Here’s our conversation with Sour Widows, lightly edited for length and clarity.
photo credit: Jaxon Whittington
Post Trash: I really like the record! I was stunned that it was your debut, because I feel like you've been around for a while, and of course, that’s because you have been around for a while. So, I have to ask: After everything that’s happened, what is the feeling of finally having Revival of a Friend out in the world?
Susanna: It feels really good! It would be easy in hindsight to wonder how things might be different if a full length had come out sooner. But we feel great about our path. It's what’s happened. We're such more technically skilled musicians now than we were when we started the project. There are songs on this record that we would not have been able to execute sooner than when we recorded them.
PT: It certainly feels like a statement. This is no 28-minute album of one and half minute songs.
Susanna: It's rare these days to put out a full length that's an hour long, basically. Maybe that’s a bit of a gamble, but it feels appropriate. It's like, okay, it's taken us seven years to put out a full length, it'd better be juicy! [both laugh]
Maia: Yeah. I feel like there were a lot of people asking, when are you gonna put out the album? The whole song and dance of selling yourself to various parts of the industry hoping to gain some kind of support or team. It makes sense. They want to see a tight finished product. Okay, well, this is the tightest, most finished product we could possibly put together after seven years.
PT: That people were asking you about when the album was coming out gets to the heart of the tension that exists in the music industry between trying to balance the commercialized product with the artfulness of it. How do y’all balance that?
Maia: You mean, how do we as musicians view ourselves in an industry that doesn't value art?
PT: [laughs] Exactly.
Susanna: We talk about it a lot.
Maia: It can feel very depressing. Not to be all pathologizing, but recently in therapy, I admitted for the first time that being a musician is really depressing. Not because I don't think it's worthwhile. It's the complete opposite. Because music is worthwhile, it's deeply sad how little value is placed on art making. It's hard.
PT: Hard how?
Maia: It's putting a metric on something that’s hard to quantify.
Susanna: Or impossible to quantify. Art’s not meant to be quantified.
Maia: But we live in a world that requires it to be quantified. And now it's to the point where it's almost impossible to make a living from (making art). There really isn’t a way to be a middle-class artist in this day and age. Either you're really fucking struggling, or you have some amount of success, but you absolutely still have a side hustle, or you are super, super famous. It’s an obstacle course.
PT: If you could solve that obstacle course, though, would you accept the level of fame it would require for Sour Widows to be your full-time job?
Maia & Susanna: [at the same time] Oh, hell yeah, fuck yea, 100%.
Susanna: That’s been our goal since day one.
Maia: But not even in like a we-want-to-be-famous type of way, just in a way where I don't want to have to do anything else. I don't feel like I should. If this is my skill, and this is the work that I put in and I basically do this as a full-time job already, why shouldn’t I get to make music the way I support myself? If there was an avenue to take where we were able to do this full time I would 100% take that avenue.
Susanna: If it is the will of the people, then we’ll give the people what they want. [laughs] That’s Sour Widows industry!
Maia: With that being said, I don’t ever want to make a Tik Tok. [laughs]
Susanna: As a band with a 100% DIY background, starting this project knowing literally no other bands, and never having been in a band before—Sour Widows is the only band I've ever been in! —we have a big sense of feeling like outsiders even in our own local scene.
Maia: There’s a real believe-in-yourself type of vibe.
Susanna: Yeah. We're going into our seventh year doing this. And it is not financially lucrative in any way that supports me or Maia. It's so taxing just keeping up with the business end of things and staying goal-oriented, that we're constantly having to re-center and refocus on why we’re doing this.
PT: And what have you found?
Susanna: That we have to make this as sustainable for ourselves as possible. And if that means not keeping up with all these benchmarks that other businesspeople would say we need to meet, social media, Tik Tok, blah, blah, blah, all this pointless bullshit that musicians are forced to do now, then so be it. We're not going to spend all our time doing something that has nothing to do with the reasons we ever wanted to form a band in the first place.
Maia: Yeah. As much as possible, we’re focused on actually creating and saying what we want to say.
PT: When you think back to when you first started the band, do y'all remember what your first goal was?
Maia: We wanted to go on tour. That was the first goal that we had and that’s what we did. Our first show we ever played was our tour kickoff at 924 Gilman. There were probably like 15 people there, all friends and family, of course. And then we went on a little West Coast tour.
Susanna: We were a duo, just two guitars, which is all you need! We put together a setlist over the summer and arranged parts for the first time together and then, a month later, we were on DIY tour postings on Facebook.
PT: How did those early tours inform your perception of what touring was like?
[Maia and Susanna share a moment then laugh.]
Maia: We really bummed it those first two years, sleeping in really bizarre places every night, really relying on bands and the DIY community far and wide to help us out with lodging and whatever, getting ripped off occasionally. Recently, me and Susanna were talking about the AC/DC song “It's a Long Way to the Top If You Want to Rock and Roll.” It's as true now as it was then! I mean, we were 21, 22, so we were fine to sleep on the floor and be bum-y but it definitely makes us more grateful now for the way that we're able to tour even at this level. We get to stay in hotels sometimes! And the band’s paying for all our meals! The little things feel like luxuries now.
PT: Has the band already met your expectations from when you started? Or has the goal always been making this a career, so until you reach that goal, the band will not have lived up to your expectations?
Susanna: I think more the latter. Although I will say we’ve accomplished some goals that at the beginning I would have been like, whoa, that’s crazy. Like playing Outside Lands and touring with Duster.
Maia: A lot of what we've accomplished, I could never have guessed in my wildest dreams we would be doing. I couldn’t have known how we’d get there.
[Both laugh.]
Susanna: It’s taken a looooong time.
PT: The band’s origin story is so serendipitous—the two of you met at a summer camp, if I’m remembering correctly, then reconnected a few years later. I’m curious, do you believe in fate? Chance? What do you attribute Sour Widows to?
Maia: The stars.
Susanna: Honestly. The stars. I come from a background where that kind of stuff was very normal. My mom was a psychic and so there were a lot of things that for me were just commonplace. Just accepting that there's more to this life and to this world than we can perceive. And I think that there's such a feeling behind this band for me. And I know for Maia as well. It just feels so clear that this is what I’m meant to do at this time in my life. And it's gotten me through everything. The stuff we've each been through at young ages. It’s the hero's journey, you know. It's like, this has to work out. Because it just has to, that's the hero's path.
Maia: We've talked about comparing Sour Widows to a lifetime religious commitment, like you're pursuing a religious path. You're committing your life to faith in something that other people don't believe in. And you have to completely submit to your own faith and deal with a lot of questioning of that faith as well. There's such a cliche of the self-loathing artist, but it really feels like part of the process. Like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? And then you have to find new reasons to continue and that just creates a deeper perspective of your commitment. Having a bandmate who's a best friend is definitely part of it. We met in such a lucky set of circumstances. It's really easy for us to reinforce each other and prop each other up. Because doing it by yourself like? I can't imagine how hard that must be.
PT: Maia, you said in your recent Our Culture interview that you think about grief differently now then you did when you lost your partner in 2017. And I was curious if you could expand on that a little bit.
Maia: For me, I put grief on as a self-identity. It was kind of like armor to deal with the world and how I was feeling, which was really bad all the time. To stay close to my partner I had to adopt grief as a kind of personality, like, this is kind who I am now. I'm a person who's in grief, and I'm on this grief planet, and my partner's dead. If people want to come see me, they have to come to this planet. The experience has given me a perspective to empathize with other people who are going through a loss. I'm honestly grateful to have had it because when Suzanna lost her mom, I feel like I was actually able to be there for her in a way that would have been difficult otherwise. And as time goes by, it changes so much, and that's sad because it means you're getting farther away from the person, right? But it’s just a part of accepting it and continuing to live your life.
PT: Susanna, you're nearer, in time at least, to losing your mother. And there's an element of spirituality you’re obviously attuned to. You believe there’s more to this existence than what we see around us. Do you still feel your mother's presence? Do you still feel in contact with her?
Susanna: That's a great question. My mom could easily tap into that level of faith and trust and level of knowing because of who she was. I feel like I'm an intuitive person, but I don't feel like I have the same skillset that she did. So, even being raised the way I was, and having all these experiences that I feel proved a lot of my mom's beliefs—still, after losing her, I struggled so much with doubt. I couldn't feel her. I didn't know how to feel her and was super tortured by it. Now that it's been three years (since she passed), having a little distance from that traumatic experience, that moment in time of losing her, I've learned to double down on my faith, because it's the only choice I have.
PT: Have you had any experiences where you’ve felt connected?
Susanna: I have! Two really crazy things have happened. One was two or three days after she passed. I was on the deck of my parents’ house talking on the phone to one of my mom's best friends. It was a really beautiful, sunny day, and all of a sudden, I felt these two cold little feet on the top of my head. I screamed and this bird jumped off my head and went and sat in a bush. I had no idea where it came from, I didn't see it fly down. Just all of a sudden, there was a bird on the top of my head. Why would a bird land on my head? That's never happened to me before! There's no reason for that! And it sat in this bush while I continued talking on the phone to my mom's friend. I was laughing hysterically because I was like, that's insane. And the bird just sat in this bush and watched me for five minutes just staring at me. And then it flew straight at my face and past me.
PT: That’s wild!
Susanna: And I did also have another experience a few months after that, where I was getting my hair cut by this woman I'd never met before. And we were just kind of chatting, and then she's like, can I ask you a weird question? I said, Sure. And she asked if my grandmother was still alive. And I was like, um, well, one of them is, one passed a few years ago. And she was kind of quiet for a bit. Then I said, I did lose my mom a couple of months ago. And she said, that's who it is! Your mom is here! She went on to describe exactly what my mom looked like, her physical appearance. She said, your mom is showing herself to me in a field of yellow flowers. And she’s beaming and happy and she just wants you to know that she's fine.
PT: What did that make you think?
Susanna: I don't know. Look, when it comes to matters like this, there's always a way you can explain it away. But at some point, you just got to let it in. Because it's the only way through. Life is unknowable and unbelievable. And the things that happen beyond life are unknowable and unbelievable. Those two experiences both happened in moments where I really needed them, being so in the depths of grief. My mom was my soulmate, my best friend. And I was very lucky to have her on this plane for as long as I did. But the times where I don't know how I'm supposed to feel, or when I haven't felt her talk directly to me, maybe that's because I'm too close to it. Who knows? But the moments that are given to us like that are really important to hold on to. It’s a big part of why I feel so deeply committed to this project, because we're struggling so hard for it. I just know this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I want all the joys that come from this kind of path of being an artist. It's the most magical thing I can imagine. And life's all about magic. Life has to feel magical.
Postscript via email:
PT: One final question I forgot to ask y’all: Who is the "friend" in the album's title?
Maia and Susanna: For us, the "friends" are the people we are memorializing through this album, but it's also one another, our fellow band members. The title also refers to the name of the painting we used as our album art, by artist Ben Styer.
Sour Widows is on tour now. Their album Revival of a Friend is available now via Exploding in Sound.