Watch the lush video for Skylar Gudasz’s “Rider”

Taken from her forthcoming Cinema LP.

April 02, 2020

Though it is lush and dramatic and often rendered in exquisite detail, it still seems a little obvious to describe Skylar Gudasz's music as cinematic. Her new album, due out via Suah Sounds on April 17, is already called Cinema, and "Rider," premiering at the top of the page, appears in her brother Jason Gudasz's new movie Place, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

ADVERTISEMENT

"Rider" is premiering alongside a video that was co-created by the two Gudasz siblings. Like the song itself, the video treats small moments as sweeping, grandiose statements. "Across the album, there's a lot of imagery of everyday life and labor as performance," Skylar wrote in an email to The FADER. "Jason and I kept returning to the idea of restaurant as a microcosm, a small theatre where everyone is playing out a script to a certain extent. The circumstances and narrative can change but the rituals and dances that belong to the space are performed by people in these roles, in this repetition, and within that we wanted to show a range of emotion and expression."

"The song is kind of like a lover asking, Can you really handle me, the totality of who I am? Can I even handle it?" she continued. "When I wrote it, I was envisioning this stretch of highway in Virginia on the way back to my childhood home, where the road and the trees go on for a very long time and make this kind of hourglass, and you feel like you are riding up the hourglass toward the center of the horizon. I settled on the title Rider because it's a term passed down in some old folk, traditional and blues songs as in 'I know you Rider' but also because it's a fitting word for how it feels to be a human — so much of life, we must simply hang on for."

ADVERTISEMENT

Watch the video for "Rider" at the top of the page. Cinema is out via Suah Sounds on April 17.

Watch the lush video for Skylar Gudasz’s “Rider”