Bay Area folky indie rock band Sour Widows released their long-anticipated debut album Revival of a Friend on Exploding In Sound today (read our review in Notable Releases), and for a deeper dive into where the band members’ heads were at while writing this LP, co-leader Maia Sinaiko has broken down 12 of the major influences on the album. It includes Nirvana, Big Thief, Radiohead, Alex G, Pile, and more, and some non-music choices like Lord of the Rings. Read on to see their full list and what they had to say about each one.
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10 Influences on Sour Widows’ Revival of a Friend
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Ben Styer who created the painting used as our cover art – which is also the album’s namesake – was a huge influence on the sonic and visual world of the album. His work is very mystical and dark while remaining vivid and bright. We used two of his pieces for the 2022 versions of “Witness” and “I-90” and wanted to keep the rest of the album in the same world. There’s a lot of death imagery but also magical realism in his paintings. They feel like portals to other worlds, which really resonated with the content of our album including our experiences with grief, loss, magic and friendship.
- We drew a lot of inspiration from the scores from Hayao Miyazaki’s films, as composed by Joe Hisaishi. Many of the synth sounds and parts were inspired by specific musical moments in his scores. In “Revival,” we used the scene in Porco Rosso when Porco has a near death experience as a reference for what kind of synth sounds we wanted. For the end of “Staring Into Heaven/Shining” we referenced the synth sounds from Kiki’s Delivery Service when Ursula paints Kiki as inspiration for the textures producer Maryam Qudus added.
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The ’90s – because that’s when we were kids 🙂 And a lot of amazing music came out at that time, which we feel influenced the record
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Nevermind by Nirvana, and Bruce Vig’s production style. We recorded huge walls of guitars and punchy drums on certain songs to expand on the big parts of the louder heavier songs like “Big Dogs” and “Shadow Of A Dove”.
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A Few Small Repairs by Shawn Colvin – one of Susanna’s mom’s favorite albums, and an album that was on heavy rotation during Sus’s childhood. The production and guitar work on this album directly influenced initiati
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Alex G, especially his more bizarro songs like “Look Out,” “Mud” and “Sugar”.
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Radiohead – it’s tough to pick just one of their records since their career has spanned so many genres that feel equally influential, but we all draw a lot of inspiration and energy from Amnesiac.
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UFOF and Two Hands by Big Thief – Adrienne Lenker’s lyricism and the textural landscapes of these two records. The rhythm performance on these albums has also been massively inspirational in terms of feel and spatial awareness that we wanted to create on our record.
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Pile – Green And Gray. Rick McGuire is a genius and has taught us that there is no such thing as too many parts in a song, and delicate moments can coexist with grit and filth in perfect harmony.
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Our loved ones – those who are here and those who are no longer with us. This includes each other.
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Magic. It’s real.