Elisabeth Moss Falls Apart in Queer Music Video From Brandi Carlile

On the heels of her six Grammy nominations, lesbian singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile has released a new music video from her Album of the Year-nominated By the Way, I Forgive You.

Elisabeth Moss stars in the video for “Party of One” as one half of a gay couple struggling to make a relationship work. She and her on-screen partner, played by Nicole Disson, are shown going through the ups and downs of a relationship — laughing together in a bed by the window, yelling at each other on the kitchen floor, making that choice to set anger aside and work things out. 

“I was drunk,” Carlile told Rolling Stone Country of writing the song. “I was listening to [Joni Mitchell’s] Blue in the hayloft of my barn, and I was feeling an insane amount of pressure to make my domestic life work, more pressure than a straight person.”

The video gives the feeling of stepping into a haunting, shots of unused furniture covered in sheets that flutter in an otherwise still room, something moving throughout it despite the closed windows and closed doors. It's raw, and wrenching in its starkness, much like the song itself.

Carlile was hesitant to make a video for "Party of One," which she considered “not in any way commercial” and deeply personal, and ultimately decided there was only one way she would agree to it.

“I thought, ‘Well if we’re gonna make a video we’re gonna make a video with Elisabeth Moss, or we’re not gonna make a video,” she told Vanity Fair. “I had this weird insight into the fact that she would be the cornerstone to it. She responded and said, ‘Yeah, but I want to produce this and I want to get involved with the treatment and I want a female director.’ . . . Now that it’s done, it’s probably the thing—visually—that I’m most proud of in my career.”