Maude Latour Learns to Love Her Post-Breakup Self in ‘Headphones’ Video
Maude Latour knew bright days were ahead following a painful breakup — even if every moment wasn’t sunshine-filled, as the singer-songwriter addresses in the video for her new single “Headphones.”
The video, which premieres on Rolling Stone, was “an absolute dream created out of total imagination,” Latour says. The visual follows the 22-year-old as she walks through the city as she turns into a giant — à la Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman — before shrinking into a miniature version of herself as she meets with a ladybug. (Latour loves ladybugs.) “As I was writing the song, all I could see was walking through a field of grass, except I was as small as an ant. We made it happen,” she tells Rolling Stone. “This song is about all of those wildest dreams coming to life.”
The Steven Mertens-directed fantasy is also laced with real-life anecdotes as Latour sings about “laying on the footsteps to the library” — something she actually did after her break up a student at Columbia University. “They’re also the same steps where I filmed the ‘One More Weekend’ video with a broken heart,” she adds.
Latour — who successfully marries early Lorde-like vocals with a pop-perfect sound — says she wrote “Headphones” after going through that difficult split and was feeling “truly alone” for the first time. “It started with me lying on my dorm room floor, realizing I was going to be alone in my head for my entire life,” she explains. “The world suddenly opened up. I truly got to know myself and learning to love being alone became my dream.”
With the help of producer Mike Adubado, Latour finished writing the song nearly a year and a half after she first penned it. The last two lines of the chorus were added in a nod to another defining moment happening in Latour’s life at the time: being signed to Warner Records. (“I let the music lead the way so I can show you who I am/I put my headphones on and I play my song,” she sings.)
“By the end of last summer, as I was adding finishing touches to the song, something changed. I had changed,” the songstress says. “The song started out as an anthem for loving being alone, being by yourself, falling in love with your own mind… But I had realized that once you can love and accept yourself, there actually is room for love.”
“Headphones,” then, became not an anthem of loving solitude, but “seeing love everywhere.”
The new single follows the release of Latour’s Strangers Forever EP last year, which features her breakout hit “One More Weekend,” as well as the all-too-relatable tracks “Block Your Number” and “Clean.” “Music is always a deeply spiritual experience, and my best work happens when I am in total flow, just being a conduit, letting something flow through me,” she says.
