Life After Hospice: An ACL Interview with Peter Silberman of The Antlers

With Hospice, I've read a bunch of different takes on the theme. What exactly was it that compelled you to write that?

The record is based on a relationship I was in. It was just a very dysfunctional relationship--both of us being just way too young, impulsive, and kind of stupid. It was mutual destruction, I guess. It was a very dark time. That's why I ended up writing a record about it, because there was just a lot of unfinished business with it, and a lot of stuff I was trying to figure out at that point in time. It turned into the record that was Hospice.

When I was making it, I didn't really know if the record was going to make any sense, but I did feel like I've known so many people in different versions of similar situations. It just seemed like something that there should be more records about: really just fucked up relationships that totally normal people get into.

Yeah. Definitely. How was it to tour with that material? I would think it would be pretty taxing after awhile.

It definitely was, but I didn't realize it at the time. I think while we were doing these shows, I wasn't thinking about the songs themselves; I was thinking about how to play them and how to sing them, and was also taking in the whole atmosphere of a live show. These shows just getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger was definitely a weird experience. It took adjusting to. But it was great. It was really cool to see people connecting to it. I've never witnessed something like that before. That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, to see somebody so strongly connect to something that I had experienced. I think any band would be burnt out with it, but by putting my personal life out there I was just really done with it by the time we got to take a break. I wanted to move away from it. It was long enough to be dwelling on something.

Then how did you approach Burst Apart in contrast to Hospice?

Well, making the record was entirely different because we moved into our own studio, which is where we still are, and recorded the record ourselves, the three of us--Darby, Michael and I. But that wasn’t really how Hospice was made. Hospice was really like a bedroom project. I was working on it most of the time and Darby and Michael and my friend, Sharon Van Etten, and some other people were kind of coming in to play tracks and write tracks on top of it.

So this was like the three of us building a perfect round-up--keeping Hospice in mind, but wanting at the same time to move away from it and forget about it. I mean it kind of led to a record that in some ways is about & Hospice. I think a lot of Burst Apart is about wanting to push Hospice away and wanting to forget about that period of time and the kind of mark that it left on me and how it ended up shaping the way I think now, but then ultimately a kind of reconciliation with it at the end.

It’s always interesting to hear how people create. Do you miss solo work? You were working as a solo artist originally with The Antlers project and I know the band’s evolved a little bit, it went from one to five to four to three members--where are you at now? Do you think that they’ll be more collaborations or that the band will fluctuate more?

I think at its core, the band has become the three of us, but we have friends that we play music with and we actually have our friend, Tim Mislock, touring with us playing guitar and bass. I think the nature of the band is that it keeps changing, but we try and hold onto the things about it that we think are core to it. A lot of that is having music that we feel is honest and personal.

I don’t personally miss working on solo stuff. The thing is, you can always work on solo stuff. I’m working on solo stuff now, I’m always doing that. But when you find people that you work really well together musically, creatively, I think you need to do that as long as you can just because those people don’t come along that often . It’s hard to find. It’s hard to kind of forge that relationship and maintain it and it’s something worth holding onto. It doesn’t mean you have to stop doing anything else, it just kind of means you’ve got a good thing somewhere, you want to preserve it.

And if you weren’t making music, what would you be doing?

Maybe I would be in astronomy or something. That would be great. That’s the only thing I’m as interested in as music. I took some courses on it at college. But I don’t consider myself skilled in that field or anything. I just find it fascinating.

Do you go to observatories when you are on the road?

Yeah, we tried to play a show in a planetarium but we couldn't find one that was willing to put up with a rock band. We're still looking. We're hopefully going to make that happen someday.

That would be cool. Where else would be ideal places, like dream places, to play?

It's hard to say. We're getting to see so much of the world at this point. I think the space station would be good; like to play on the space station, or on the moon. Or maybe on like a giant floating raft in the ocean. That would be cool.