Diana Silvers is sitting in a West Village diner, cozied up in a brown leather jacket while clutching a hot chocolate with whipped cream. It’s an unseasonably warm day for fall in New York City, but diner hot chocolate is a necessity, she explains. “I
like your old-school recorder,” Silvers says. “Are we rolling?” We’re rolling, I tell her. She picks up the device and deepens her voice, channeling Special Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks. “Diane, it’s October 13,” she declares. “12:07 p.m. at the Waverly Diner.”
Flawless Kyle MacLachlan impersonation aside, we’re not here today to discuss Silvers’ acting skills, which have brought her roles on Booksmart, Ma, and Greg Daniels and Steve Carell’s 2020 Netflix series Space Force. She’s gearing up to release Daughter of Sorts, her new album out Nov. 13 via Capitol. The 14 intimate folk songs are dazzling and devastating all at once as Silvers navigates the loss of her father and the challenges that come with being in your late-twenties (Silvers will turn 29 on Nov. 3).
“I knew I wanted to make a record that was about the transition of girlhood to womanhood, because that’s very much where I am in my life,” she says. “And this isn’t throwing any shade to anybody, but I felt like there wasn’t a lot of modern music that was reflecting [that].”
Silvers’ recent pair of singles, “Daughter” and “Plans,” reflect both of these themes. On the former, she sings, “What if I can’t be/What you want me to be?/Somebody’s mother/Somebody’s bride/Somebody’s lover/Somebody’s wife.” Silvers wrote it last April, while she was playing in open G-tuning, trying to learn how to play “Little Green,” Joni Mitchell’s tender ode to the child who she gave up for adoption in the mid-Sixties. “I was like, ‘Man, this is too hard. Forget it,’” Silvers remembers. “Then I just started fingerpicking with the pattern, and out of nowhere ‘Daughter’ happened, which in a way is its own weird response to that song. She’s the greatest of all time.”
Silvers’ debut From Another Room arrived in October 2025, the same month her father died (she announced Daughter of Sorts on Oct. 19, the one-year anniversary of his death). She’d rather not go into specifics out of respect for her family — Silvers is one of six kids, and both of us bond over being the second youngest in big families — but his death was sudden, and she immediately began writing about her grief. “We had a strained relationship, if you couldn’t tell from the music,” she says.
That’s apparent in “Plans,” where Silvers grapples with regrets (“I had plans/To show up again/And be your daughter/Do you believe me?”) and lifelong loss (“I will miss you/For the rest of my life”). There’s also “8.8,” featuring a voicemail from her dad, titled after his birthday, Aug. 8. “You don’t realize how much you feel like a child until you lose a parent, and then you’re skyrocketed into adulthood,” she says. “Every part of this record, every choice, was made so specifically to mirror that experience.”
Silvers, who lives in New York, co-produced Daughter of Sorts with Jason Alder, known for his work with Rick Rubin. They cut the album at the Houdini mansion in Laurel Canyon, and she shows me a photo from the night she recorded “Plans,” when her mom was in the room. “She started crying,” Silvers says. “There was something about having my mom there listening that had an impact.”
“8.8” is one of several interludes on the record. There’s also “Interlude for a Unicorn,” in which Silvers puts a microphone up to a music box she got for $1 at a flea market and adds spoken word over it, a move inspired by Björk’s Vespertine. Birds appear frequently across the record, and she whistles their sound on “Margaret’s Music Box.” She feels a kinship with Phoebe Bridgers, who wrote about grieving her father on her new album Lost Weekend. “She also lost her dad out of the blue three years ago,” she says. “She [sings], ‘He’s not coming back as a bird,’ and I was like ‘Whoa.’ Grief is universal and very specific.”
Though her debut only arrived last year, Silvers has been singing all her life. Growing up in Los Angeles, she began playing the cello when she was nine years old, and secretly played her dad’s Steinway piano he kept in his study. She learned songs like Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and John Mayer’s “Dreaming With a Broken Heart” on it, until she shifted to guitar around the age of 14. She sang choir in high school, and bought her first guitar as a freshman at New York University. In the fall of 2019, she was scouted by an A&R man at Republic and recorded a song with in-house producers, but it was far from what she envisioned.
“They were just like, ‘OK, here’s how it’s going to be,’” she remembers. “We ended up making, honestly, a banger of a pop song, but I will never put that out. Maybe as a joke one day, like if I’m hosting SNL, I’ll do my pop song. But that’s it.” She’s glad she waited until the right time to start her music career, particularly in her late twenties. “I was really young, and I don’t think I could have handled it,” she says. “I know myself now well enough to know that I actually really, really value having a very normal life. Most of my friends are not in the industry at all. And I like that people don’t care when I walk into a room.”
There’s only one romantic love song on Daughter of Sorts: the highlight “un(Lovers).” It’s a collaborative track featuring two Strokes members (bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti, who provided a string arrangement), and two Wallows members (Dylan Minnette on backing vocals and Cole Preston on drums). It’s an outlier on an album about loss, but Silvers still felt like it belonged. “I was like, ‘Eh, it’s also part of this whole process of life,” she says.
Silvers has a couple of upcoming shows behind Daughter of Sorts, and she recently wrapped production on the film Asymmetry, which she stars opposite Richard Gere. “I don’t know if anyone knows this, but that guy’s going to be a star,” she jokes. She takes out her phone to show me another photo: Her on the set of the true-crime drama PRƎPPY, which is based on the real-life “Preppy Killer” Robert Chambers. Silvers plays Jennifer Levin, whom Chambers murdered in Central Park in the summer of 1986.
The role marks Silvers’ first time playing a real person, which is new territory for her. “It’s weird to feel close to someone that I never knew,” she says. “There’s not even a lot of pictures of her. I’ve read interviews of actors talking about these things, and I roll my eyes. But now that I’m doing it, I’m like, ‘No, there’s something to be said there.’ It’s a very spiritual experience, and the veil becomes very thin between what’s reality and the ethers.”
Silvers recently wrote a song for Levin, a reminder of how her music and acting careers are intertwined. But she feels most herself when she’s performing her songs. “I feel very much like I can actually be who I am,” she says. “I’m not pitching on behalf of a studio. I’m just like, ‘I wrote all of these by myself in my room.’” She says it plainly now, her hot chocolate all but consumed: “What you see is what you get.”
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