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In April of last year, Diana Silvers wrote the song “Daughter.”
Over finger-picked acoustic guitar, the 29-year-old model, actress and singer-songwriter ruminates on the transition from girlhood to womanhood through
the eyes of her mother — who, by the age Silvers is now, was already married with two children.
“I can’t do it alone/ I don’t want to be grown,” Silvers croons in a soft, mellow tone. “I’m still a daughter/ Still somebody’s child.”
Six months later, the song would come to hold a heavier weight. On Oct. 20, Silvers was on tour in Cincinnati, Ohio, when she got a call from her mom saying that her father had unexpectedly died. The next few weeks were a blur — she planned and attended his funeral, turned 28 and released her debut album, “From Another Room.” It’s a chain of events she’s still processing one year on.
“I feel like we’re doing record scratch, freeze frame,” Silvers tells Variety over Zoom from the kitchen floor of her New York City apartment. “You’re probably wondering how we got here, and how this record came to be.”
Her sophomore album “Daughter of Sorts” — out Friday via Capitol Records — was already halfway written by the time her dad passed, including the moody, lilting guitar part for “Plans.” Everything was uncertain, but only a month afterwards, the words for the song came tumbling out of her.
“I had plans to show up again/ And be your daughter/ Do you believe me?” Silvers asks, later echoing “Daughter” with the heart-wrenching line: “I don’t want to be grown/ I want to go home.” Fittingly, the song was released as a double single alongside “Daughter” on Oct. 23.
“It just feels like everything I do is gonna be for my dad now,” Silvers remembers telling her acupuncturist a few months after his death. “And she’s like, ‘Wasn’t it always?’ I was like, ‘Damn.’ Because, you know, it’s clear in this record that we had a complicated relationship.”
Silvers hadn’t spoken to her father for two-and-a-half years when he passed. Still, many of the songs on “Daughter of Sorts” — a record originally intended to be about the growing pains of your 20s — became about him and, more broadly, the inevitable passage of time.
“There’s only two things that are certain in this life: birth and death,” she says. “And everything in between is the journey between those two absolute truths of existing.”
If “From Another Room” introduced Silvers as a folk singer-songwriter to watch, “Daughter of Sorts” cements her as an artist wise beyond her years. Equal parts devastating and uplifting, the record tackles growing up, death, grief and renewal through lyrics that are deeply personal, but still inviting. “Magnolia Tree” opens the album with a young adult’s hopeful look towards the future; “(Un)Lovers” is a duet about the trials and tribulations of young love; “Dorothy” a strings-laden “Wizard of Oz” character study examining the harsh realities of growing up; “Riviera” laments a turbulent parental relationship; “Birdsong” deals with the after-effects of loss; and closer “Going, Gone” is a sparsely-worded elegy rooted in acceptance.
“I really, really hope that people see themselves in it,” Silvers says of the album. “I know what it means to me, and I think there are songs that people are going to also apply to relationships with their mothers, their lovers, their friends.”
By March of this year, “Daughter of Sorts” had started to take shape and Silvers headed to Laurel Canyon — the musical home of one of her biggest inspirations, Joni Mitchell — to record in the famed Houdini Estate, with Rick Rubin collaborator Jason Lader as her producer and engineer. Together, they built out the album’s sonic world, keeping certain songs acoustic as Diana had written them and adding strings, drums and bass to others.
For second track “(Un)Lovers,” the only song about romantic love on the album, Silvers enlisted Dylan Minnette of Wallows for a duet. His bandmate, Cole Preston — who Silvers met at a Paul McCartney concert in L.A. — played drums on the track, as well as on two other songs on the record.
“I started to hear this counter melody of a man’s voice, and I was like, ‘I wonder if Dylan would be down?'” Silvers says. “I think he has such a lovely voice, and he’s also just one of the kindest people. It was the last thing we recorded, and to me it completed the whole song.”
Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti of the Strokes also happened to be in town rehearsing for Coachella, and as Lader engineered their latest album, dropped by the studio. They ended up also contributing to
“(Un) Lovers,” with Fraiture on bass and Moretti arranging the strings section.
“It was very serendipitous — the making of this record and all of the people that I met at that time. When I listen to the record, it feels like there’s really good energy in the music,” Silvers says. “This feels like the best way to turn something that I thought was gonna kill me at first into something that, hopefully, gives other people life.”
Four of the album’s 14 tracks are minute-long interludes, for which Silvers learned ProTools and produced herself with encouragement from Lader. The final interlude, “8.8,” is a voicemail from her dad. “You never talk to me, but I wish you would,” his deep voice booms over a softly-strummed acoustic guitar. “So, if you get a chance, can you please call me so we can catch up a little bit? It’s just been a long time.”
Silvers found the voicemail just two days after he passed, and felt like it “perfectly summed up our relationship,” adding: “His words are kind, but there’s a tinge of disappointment in his voice.”
It’s obviously an incredibly vulnerable moment to include, but Silvers didn’t want to shy away from the reality of their strained connection — and also thinks of it as a way to commemorate him.
“My dad had a pretty incredible voice,” she says. “I want it to be immortalized because when I listen to artists that I love who are no longer living, they live and breathe through their voices and through their art and through their music. And I just want to pay that forward.”
It brought Silvers comfort to see that Phoebe Bridgers also included a voicemail from her late father on her latest album, “Lost Weekend.”
“The spirit and essence of my father is that he very much loved me,” Silvers says, holding back tears. “And I think that whether I called him or not, he did. And I’d like to think Phoebe — I don’t know anything about her relationship with her dad, this is just my own projection — whether or not she called him, he loved her and was always gonna call and leave a voicemail. You know what I mean? And that gives me relief too, and alleviates some of the guilt.”
Despite the huge shifts in Silvers’ life in the past year, she admits that it did, in a way, force her to grow up — and for the better. As she sings on “Dorothy,” the album’s fifth track: “You better let some air in/ There is no race to win.”
The song was inspired by a conversation Silvers had with her acting teacher, who told her: “I think this will be very good for you, because you’re finally going to let some air into your life.”
“He was right,” Silvers says now. As counterintuitive as it may seem, dealing with grief has allowed Silvers to untangle some of her unhealthy thought patterns.
“For such a long time, I lived my life in such a restrained box. I had a lot of obsessive, compulsive, if-then thinking,” she explains. “And then it was like, OK, the thing that I was fearing — the big, bad thing — happened, even though I followed all the rules. And I was like, ‘Oh, so I guess in life, shit’s just gonna happen, and it’s not because I’m a good or bad person. It’s just because things happen.'”
The realization has given Silvers a newfound freedom — to create, to love, to enjoy life. In the past year, she became friends with her neighbors, who introduced her to her boyfriend; she filmed two movies back to back and found the process rewarding instead of exhausting; and she no longer regrets choosing to stay out late with friends.
This point was hammered home by an anecdote shared with her by someone who had seen her father a few days before his passing. “He was reminiscing on the place that he and my mom would go to dinner when she was pregnant with one of my siblings, and driving down Sunset in the ’80s,” she says.
“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s the stuff you remember — the time that you spent with your friends and your family, when you were saying yes to the world.'”
Silvers is finally ready to do just that.
