When Brandi Carlile’s record label first approached her about making a music video for her 2018 song “Party of One,” she was hesitant. She wrote the song, off her album By the Way, I Forgive You, one night when she was particularly feeling the pressure that society puts on queer people who only just received the right to marry a handful of years ago. The song is raw, and it’s close to home; if Carlile was going to make a music video, there was only one woman she would consider for the job.

“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 said in a phone call last Thursday, one day before she was nominated for six Grammy Awards, including album of the year. “So, I just started personally writing her letters until she responded.” Carlile, who says she writes more letters than she does songs, waited patiently for Moss’s response. The stakes were low; if she didn’t hear back, that was fine, because the actress was her one and only choice. Nine months later she got a yes.

“I had this weird insight into the fact that she would be the cornerstone to it,” she said. “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."

In the video, Moss and her co-star, Nicole Disson, play a couple depicted fighting in their kitchen. You can see Moss mouthing, “You have to trust me.” In response, Disson screams back as the story of their relationship tension—and the eventual makeup— plays out on-screen. “It’s hard to watch because I’ve been there,” Carlile said of the video. “I’ve been on that kitchen floor.”

In a press release, Moss said that she has been a fan of Carlile, too, and she jumped at the chance to make this video: “The main reason I wanted to be involved in this music video was because of this incredible song. I had accosted Brandi when we were both on Ellen because I had been obsessively listening to her cover of Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” to help me prepare for a cover I had to do of it for the movie Her Smell. . . . [“Party of One”] is one of those most beautiful musical pieces I’ve ever heard, right down to the string arrangement at the end.”

Just as she asked, Moss served as both creative director and producer of the video, alongside director Bérénice Eveno. The female-led production made Carlile happy, though the actual filming of the video raised her stress levels—only because it felt so realistic. The singer-songwriter watched from the monitor in another room, to stay out of the way, and throughout the shoot thought the sound was off. It turns out Moss and Disson were acting without words, right up until the fight scene, the last shot of the day. Then sound erupted from the filming room.

“That’s when I knew that the sound had never been off,” Carlile said. “It was insane; everyone in the room burst into tears, because it was so stressful. That went down; that was real. They were, like, actually escalating it so bad that it more than felt real. I would say it got real.”

Though watching the filming of this video might have brought back some tough memories, this song, overall, represents hope for Carlile. It represents the triumph of queer love in a heteronormative world, and reflects specifically on her relationship with wife Catherine Shepherd, whom she married in 2012, and the challenges they’ve faced together.

“I felt like I was in catastrophic territory in my life and needed to come to terms with what my options were and what they weren’t,” she said. “And when I checked in with myself, I realized that not making [the marriage] work was not an option for me, and for so many reasons. And I’m so happy about that. I find that pressure that I’m talking about to not be a negative thing but a real inspiration for me.”

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