Delivering all the feels, ‘Aeroplane Bathroom’ is the latest track from Sydney-via-Canowindra musician Gordi – also known as Sophie Payten.
Lifted from her forthcoming album, Our Two Skins album due for release June 19, the song (also the album opener) is accompanied by Gordi’s most stunning video released to date, which conveys the isolation and crippling anxiety that the album explores.
It is a captivating combination of both sadness and hope, and spawns from Gordi’s internal struggle with her identity as she renegotiated who she was and how she fit into the world.
“I wrote ‘Aeroplane Bathroom’ sitting in a window seat on a long haul flight,” she reveals. “The people next to me were asleep and I was alone with my thoughts. I had that sensation of being trapped so I climbed over the other passengers and tried to escape to the bathroom.”
“The song is about feeling isolated. It comes at a very strange time now given we’re all locking ourselves in our homes, ‘socially isolating’ from our normal functional lives. There is no more dehumanising experience than to be cut off from everything you know. It can plunge you into total despair.”
Recorded at her parents’ farm in Canowindra with the help of Bon Iver production duo Chris Messina and Zach Hanson, an original vocal to an out of tune piano was teased out to add soundscape. If you listen closely to the track, you can hear elements from the farm shining through – gates and chains, creaking doors, and a revving Subaru Impreza. This stripped-back approach to the recording process was applied to the album in its entirety with all ten tracks laid down at the farm, using minimal equipment and effectively bottled the isolation and emptiness she felt during that period of rediscovery.
‘Aeroplane Bathroom’ arrives complete with a cinematic video from Kasimir Burgess, appropriately filmed across two aeroplane graveyards outside Bangkok. “To get in we had to negotiate with the squatters that live there,” says Gordi. “It was one-million-percent humidity and there were wild dogs and a small crocodile so any fear in my eyes is genuine.”
Check it out below and try not to cry.
Our Two Skins will be released on June 19 via Liberation Records for Australia/ New Zealand.
Photo by Jess Gleeson
