The rise of The Antlers following their searingly vivid and raw 2009 concept album Hospice was a surprise both for fans and the band themselves. For a work so deeply honest, mining the intersection of love and loss, its carefully crafted and brilliant execution seemed almost impossible to surpass. The Antlers toured rigorously for well over a year following the release, allowing the work to grow, mutate and transform into an experience intensely personal and yet shared among an increasing community of listeners. What was essentially the debut album from The Antlers as a trio (Peter Silberman at the helm, with Michael Lerner and Darby Cicci alongside) became nothing short of a phenomenon, causing a stir of critical acclaim and widespread celebration. In doing so, however, it gave rise to major doubts concerning Silberman’s ability to follow Hospice’s eminence with a work of equal measure.
While their sophomore release Burst Apart veers away from any heavily constructed concept and instead soaks in the electronic rock stratosphere, it is in no way a disappointment. Certainly it will be seen as such for many who hold Hospice within an inch of their heart, and that’s wholly natural and in no way an affront to that contingent. However, it’s important to recognize that Burst Apart employs a different language than Hospice, and while they may share similarities in their universal searching for meaning through love and human connection, they also greatly diverge in their journey for doing so.
Glide Magazine’s Peter Zimmerman recently spoke with Silberman about the writing and release of Burst Apart. Below is a transcript of that conversation, ranging from Silberman’s approach to Hospice following such a lengthy tour behind it, what inspired the songs that formed Burst Apart, performing the record for a major NPR showcase and his excitement in presenting the work for the world over the coming year.
I wanted to start off by talking about the recording process behind this new album, Burst Apart. Your previous record, Hospice, was written and recorded in your bedroom, but this one was done in a studio share situation, and the writing was more collaborative. How did you approach writing and recording Burst Apart? Was anything different with this release?
I think with this record everything changed, like I’ve never recorded a record this way. I don’t think any of us have. Hospice was really a bedroom project, as you said– it was me a lot of the time around the clock in my room just on a laptop– very simple setup, and everyone coming in and writing parts on top of what was already there. In a way, it felt less like a band and more like a project. With this, because we moved into our own studio and we had as much time as we wanted in there, and it was a real, pretty legit setup, it changed the entire way we went about it. The three of us could play music all day, and record when we wanted to and see what we came up with. There was less pre-conceived orchestration and arrangements. The whole record was an experiment. It would be us recording one idea, and then recording another idea on top of that, and another on top of that– seeing what take it took, and then these songs kind of formed themselves in a weird way. They’re simple songs, because we wanted to keep the songs simple, but explore different sounds. And once you use that simple framework as a way to really build things that have personality, and that aren’t necessarily hyper-technical.
Because you guys toured Hospice for so long, did you go into the studio wanting to break away from structure? Was it refreshing to not have as much of a framework?
Yeah, definitely. I think what was great about it and what we embraced about it was the free nature of the project — the fact that we could go into it and we were like “we can make whatever we want right now.” I think we felt pressured to make another big concept record– something narrative– but I don’t think we wanted to do that, and anytime I tried to, at least, it didn’t feel right. It felt totally forced. The more we let go, the more the whole thing started to make sense to us, as far as what we wanted it to sound like, or what we wanted the record to be.
Hospice comes from such a deeply personal space, so I’m interested to hear what sort of backstories or experiences propelled this new album for you as a writer. Did anything signify to you directly that it was time to get back in the studio?
Well, it was really our touring dying down that decided when we were going to go into the studio. There were two years spent on touring Hospice, so there wasn’t much of a chance to record a new album– we were just gone so much. But then we had about five or six months off, and it was just the right time.
As far as subject matter going into it; it came from a lot of places. Part of it was a very immediate thing– a very “here’s where I’m at now and this is what I’m thinking and feeling”– but it was also really weighted by the past. It was informed by Hospice, and the record itself was a bit of a response to Hospice and the way things happened with that album. The way that it felt like a very personal and close story to me, and then as we toured and toured on it, it began to feel less that way, because it was really becoming everyone else’s record, not mine. But also, you repeat something so many times that the meaning starts to become confusing. It doesn’t become meaningless, necessarily, but you try and reconcile the fact that you can say something a million times and not think about it. In this case, I could sing these very personal songs and not be thinking about them while I’m singing them. That kind of messes with you.
Burst Apart is pretty much an all new record. We demoed– well, actually, not even demoed, we just made different weird little electronic versions of these songs about half a year before starting the recording in September. But, I think “French Exit” was the only song that we toured with, just for the sake of having a new song that was a bit of a break from the Hospice songs that we were playing everyday.
You’ve indicated in the past that the songs on Hospice started to exist more as live songs to you, changing their appearance from their original recorded versions. That you didn’t feel necessarily tied to the album arrangements. On Burst Apart, the songs are much more spontaneous and at times even amorphous. Have you been experimenting with re-envisioning these new songs live, as well?
We’ve done a good amount of touring for this new record already. We’ve just completed the first round of shows, and we’re about to embark on the next. Over the past few months, we’ve kept things fairly faithful to Burst Apart. There’s just a lot of things you can do in the studio that you can’t do live, and we didn’t try to replicate and recreate the record note for note, but it is fairly faithful to those recordings. But, I think as the year goes on we’re naturally going to change things around.
I guess what I’m saying isn’t entirely true, because I’d say on about three or four of the songs from Burst Apart we jam them out for ten minutes or so. “Rolled Together,” “Parentheses” and “Putting the Dog to Sleep” are all like that. So, they’re definitely changing.
You performed Burst Apart in its entirety for NPR at South by Southwest, before it was released commercially. When you were asked to do that set, did you want to approach it as a faithful representation of the record? Did you feel any pressure because it was for most the first time they heard the new material, and the songs would be live?
We were nervous about it because we had to learn how to play these songs after recording them. We didn’t record them in a way where it was very simple tracking of songs that we wrote together. We pieced it together step by step, and we had to go back and figure out how we would do it as four people, and how we would divide the parts– who would play what and what parts of the songs we would or would not play. I think for the NPR gig our approach was that we would just play these songs, to keep focused. In preparation we were going to keep playing the album all the way through and we don’t know how it’s going to sound, but by the end of it we’ll at least be comfortable, and that’s the best that we can hope for.
Was it nice to have a deadline like that– a moment at which you had to be ready to perform this material?
Yeah, absolutely. It was definitely necessary. I think we felt like we wanted a vacation after we recorded Burst Apart, wanting to lay low and relax, but what we needed to actually do was learn how to play these songs and practice them right away, so it was good to have something to force us to do that.
Have you had any down time since Hospice? It seems like you have been going pretty nonstop since 2009.
We get our downtime now and again (laughs). We’re in a more relaxed period right now, since we just came back from a tour late this spring / early this summer. We’ve been home for about a month now, and we’ve been doing some recording, but with a very relaxed approach. No stress. We’re leaving again in a couple weeks for some festivals, and that’s when the big round of touring starts up again.
It’s a very different feeling now that we’ve recorded the “follow-up” album and released it, and that’s it’s going well and it seems like a bunch of people like it, so now there’s no stress with it. We don’t have to put out another album any time soon, so we’re kind of just recording and seeing what we like and doing what we want. It’s good times right now.
Was there material for Burst Apart that didn’t make the record?
As far as the Burst Apart sessions and the time period when we were recording the album, there really isn’t much left over. We didn’t finish any songs that we didn’t put on the album. There’s definitely pieces of songs lying around that I think are waiting to be turned into something. Also, this entire time since Hospice I’ve been recording a ton of electronica stuff, most of which is not finished, but maybe will become something someday. Darby’s also been working on a lot of his own music for a while, too. So, there’s definitely Antlers material out there that hasn’t yet been finished. We are constantly working on things, just sometimes it’s hard to wrap everything up together.
One of the recurring themes I see in Burst Apart is an engagement of dream psychology. I think electronica allows itself that suspension of reality that makes dream logic so plausible. I’m wondering what sort of material you work with when you’re writing– what are your influences? Has any outside literature or music anchored your writing process?
It really changes. When I was making Hospice I was reading all the time. I was specifically reading things about dysfunctional relationships– about quietly dysfunctional relationships, particularly.
I can’t imagine why!
Exactly. (laughs) For Burst Apart, I actually wasn’t reading that much. I was listening to a lot of electronic music, though. We all were home during that entire time, and we were getting adjusted to our lives. I think that’s mainly what informed the record. After having being gone so long, with so much that had happened and our lives being changed dramatically from when we left to tour Hospice, the readjustment was really strange and kind of difficult. That ended up informing Burst Apart. But now, I feel better adjusted and ready to move forward from all the Hospice darkness.
You haven’t had much time yet to gain distance from the release of Burst Apart, but what do you think worked on the record? Are there things you wish worked better?
Burst Apart— I still really love it as a record. I still listen to it pretty often. I think part of that is because it feels like a band. It doesn’t feel like just me, so I can stand to listen to it more. I am hearing more people on it. Also, it was a very difficult record to make, in a lot of ways, so listening to it is a feeling of satisfaction and relief that we were able to do it. We were all really worried about what was going to happen next, and if we were gonna be able to make another record and if anyone would care about it as strongly as they did with Hospice. I think people have a very different feeling about Burst Apart than Hospice, and I am grateful for that. Also, I think Burst Apart is the best way to bridge the gap between Hospice and whatever comes next, but that gap definitely need to be bridged.
I do have trouble looking back at Burst Apart and finding fault with it, though. I stand very strongly behind it. I think I’ll probably be saying something different about it in a year, but right now I’m still really happy and excited about it. The feeling of freedom now is really indescribable.
For more information about The Antlers, please visit their website, follow them on Facebook or Twitter, or catch them live. Their tour behind Burst Apart continues this fall in North America before heading to Europe and the UK in November.
