Interview with The Antlers' Peter Silberman

For those of you not lucky enough to have purchased a ticket to their sold out show at Bowery Ballroom tomorrow night, here's a way for you to get your Antlers fix until they're back in January and February with Ra Ra Riot and Editors respectively: an interview with The Antlers' Peter Silberman. Peter wrote Hospice on his own, as it started out as a solo project but then in the recording process, The Antlers became the trio that we all know and love.

GFP: When you first set out, why did you decide to do a concept album? And where did you come up with the concept for Hospice?
Peter: It wasn't really a conscious decision. The songs and ideas were all centered around this one idea, this hospital setting for a collapsing relationship. I don't know that I had much say in the matter.

GFP: How did you establish the sound that prevailed throughout Hospice?
Peter: The recording of the record involved a lot of texture, layering things on top of one another until they became a different material altogether. Sometimes separate sounds come together in a way that makes them seem like one whole, sort of like the way separate songs can join together to make an interrelated whole.

GFP: What's it like to watch yourselves explode into the limelight? Talk a little bit about your journey over this past year or so and how it's affected you.
Peter: Honestly I'm not sure what's been happening for the past few months. I'm not completely lost or anything, but everything that's happened has been surreal and disorienting, and I'm not sure it'll make sense until a few months from now. It's bizarre to feel like people are crawling inside your head.

GFP: Hospice is so amazing but yet so stand-alone and full of such powerful emotions, that I'm really curious as to how you're going to follow it up... I know you've said that you're taking a break from writing/recording for a while, but when you do start writing again, do you have any ideas of what direction you're going to go?
Peter: Actually, the writing / recording hiatus is over. Hospice was exhausting, but it was finished quite awhile ago now. We're dying to make another album, and we're starting very soon. I couldn't say just yet what it'll sound like, but we're a different band than we were when Hospice was recorded. I think it'll probably sound like a different band.