Diana Silvers Turns Her Father's Death Into 'Daughter of Sorts'

By Tom Whitfield

Diana Silvers' second album, Daughter of Sorts, arrives Friday via Capitol Records, and its final interlude is a voicemail from her dead father. "You never talk to me, but I wish you would," his voice says over 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, 29, found that voicemail two days after her father died unexpectedly on Oct. 20 last year, while she was on tour in Cincinnati. She had not spoken to him in two and a half years. She told Variety the message "perfectly summed up our relationship," adding: "His words are kind, but there's a tinge of disappointment in his voice."

How grief rewrote the record

The weeks after his death compressed everything: Silvers planned and attended his funeral, turned 28, and released her debut album, From Another Room. "I feel like we're doing record scratch, freeze frame," she told Variety over Zoom from her New York City apartment. "You're probably wondering how we got here, and how this record came to be."

Daughter of Sorts was already halfway written before he passed — originally a record about the growing pains of your 20s. One month afterwards, the words to "Plans" came out: "I had plans to show up again/ And be your daughter/ Do you believe me?" The song was released Oct. 23 as a double single alongside "Daughter," written in April of last year, in which she sings: "I'm still a daughter/ Still somebody's child."

"It just feels like everything I do is gonna be for my dad now," Silvers remembers telling her acupuncturist. "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."

What's on the album?

The 14-track record spans "Magnolia Tree," a hopeful opener; "(Un)Lovers," the album's only love-song duet; "Dorothy," a strings-laden "Wizard of Oz" character study; "Riviera," about a turbulent parental relationship; "Birdsong," on the after-effects of loss; and the closing elegy "Going, Gone." Four tracks are minute-long interludes, which Silvers produced herself after learning ProTools at producer-engineer Jason Lader's urging.

She recorded the album in March at Laurel Canyon's Houdini Estate — the musical home of Joni Mitchell, one of her biggest inspirations — with Lader, a Rick Rubin collaborator.

The guest list grew by chance. Dylan Minnette of Wallows duets on "(Un)Lovers"; his bandmate Cole Preston, whom Silvers met at a Paul McCartney concert in L.A., plays drums on that track and two others. Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti of the Strokes, in town rehearsing for Coachella, dropped by and contributed bass and string arrangements to the same song.

"It was very serendipitous — the making of this record and all of the people that I met at that time," 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."

Does the vulnerability pay off?

Silvers draws a parallel to Phoebe Bridgers, who 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'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."

What does this change for Silvers? By her own account, grief dismantled her compulsive, rule-following thinking. "I lived my life in such a restrained box," she says. "Then it was like, OK, the thing that I was fearing — the big, bad thing — happened, even though I followed all the rules." In the past year she made friends with neighbors who introduced her to her boyfriend, filmed two movies back to back, and stopped regretting late nights out.

Her father, she notes, spent his final days reminiscing about dinners with her pregnant mother and driving down Sunset in the '80s. "That's the stuff you remember," she says — the moments spent saying yes to the world.