Foto-© Shervin Lainez

2009 sorgte das dritte Album Hospice, das die Geschichte einer tragischen Liebe zwischen dem Erzähler und einer todkranken, an Knochenkrebs leidenden Frau erzählt, für den großen Durchbruch des Bandprojekts The Antlers von Peter Silbermann. Es folgten die Alben Burst Apart (2011) und Familiars (2014)…und darauf sieben Jahre Veröffentlichungs-Stille! Doch nun erscheint heute endlich das neue Album Green to Gold via Transgressiv – mit einem besonderen Ansatz, wie Silbermann betont: “I think this is the first album I’ve made that has no eeriness in it…I set out to make Sunday morning music.” Zum Release hat uns das Duo um Sänger und Songwriter Peter Silberman ein Track by Track zum neuen Antlers-Album geschrieben!

1. Strawflower

A tone-setter for what’s to come and a palate-cleanser for what came before. It feels like a late-summer’s golden-hour afternoon, when days that once seemed endless begin to shrink. The Strawflower itself, blooming dry and remaining that way, preserves the spirit of summer long after it’s gone.

2. Wheels Roll Home

Wheels Roll Home is a simple song about the hopeful promise of reunion after a long time gone. It’s that feeling of finding home in someone, eager and impatient to build a life together. It’s the experience of waiting out tumultuous times, longing for stability someday.

3. Solstice

Solstice is flashback to the infinite days of peak childhood summer, innocent barefoot hikes, staying outside all afternoon and late into the evening, well past it being too dark to see. But it’s remembered from the vantage of a present day that feels unbearably long rather than joyously endless. It’s an invocation of those simpler times, an attempt to conjure the lightness of youth, before life got so damn complicated. 

4. Stubborn Man

This is a song about the more insidious tendencies of men, namely our arrogant insecurities and defensiveness. We can be immovable objects that ignore advice, enact it, then insist it was our idea all along. It’s an autobiographical admission, but one I arrived at indirectly – criticizing those qualities in others before ultimately recognizing them in myself. So I felt it was only fair to tell it in the first-person.

5. Just One Sec

This song’s about the difficulty of escaping your reputation with someone you’ve closely known for a long time. The sentiment of Just One Sec is an experiment with temporarily dropping the story between the two of you, offering and receiving momentary forgiveness, and experiencing that freedom. The idea was born out of a meditation retreat I attended a couple years ago, and the instructions of one meditation that I found particularly powerful.

6. It Is What It Is

It Is What It Is is a song about hindsight. It considers what might have changed had you handled things differently back then, and the reluctant acceptance that it’s too late for all that now. It’s the inevitability of changing seasons, transitions that feel like loss in the moment, but come to represent growth over time.

7. Volunteer

This tracks the flight of a lost person, told through the metaphor of a volunteer plant, which grows in a garden without having been intentionally planted. The song follows their journey as a seed, floating through the air, picked up by the wind and being dropped somewhere far off. It’s the experience of trying to start over on your own, just to know for yourself if you can survive. It’s the story of a flight risk, and the voice imploring them to choose to stick around.

8. Green to Gold

This is essentially a montage of a year and the transitions of its seasons, finding myself back in the same place I was a year earlier but having had so much happen. The lyrics are mostly observations of my surrounding environment, quiet moments walking my dog in the morning, noticing changes. The song is a long contemplation of the passage of time, but with the personal events and judgments omitted. Just a description of what is. 

9. Porchlight

This song is a tribute to the person that grounds me, and the power of that partnership in my life. It’s about knowing somebody so well as to recognize when they’re lost, and helping them find their way back home.

10. Equinox

The equinox is a point in the year when the number of daylight and night-time hours are equal, whereas a solstice marks the point of most imbalance between day and night. So unlike Solstice, which frustratingly attempts to reconcile the past and the present to no avail, Equinox is balanced, an integration of what’s behind and what’s now. It’s the sense that new life is ahead, even with everything heavy in the rear view. It’s incorporating past pain into who you are now, richer and more whole for having gone through all that.