When musician Peter Silberman moved to New York in 2006, he found the city to be a cold, lonely place. So instead of venturing out, he holed himself up in his apartment and recorded a handful of intimate, lo-fi bedroom recordings that were marked by his aching, falsetto voice. But in the summer of 2007, Silberman took on a larger project: the concept album Hospice. Borne of his feelings of estrangement and grief, the album follows a fictional hospice nurse assigned to care for a terminally-ill young girl.

During the writing process, Silberman said he had grown tired of working by himself. So as he began recording, he set about to incorporate other musicians. While many filtered in and out of Silberman’s studio in 2007, it was Michael Lerner (drums) and Darby Cici (multi-instrumentalist) who stuck around, incorporating brushes of bells, layered bass-lines, and other touches to transform what had been a lo-fi solo project into a complex chamber pop group. Together, they were The Antlers — a name Silberman said he had originally gave his solo project because the word sounded “woodsy” in accordance with his folk sound, but which he now thinks of in a different way — as a thing found in nature that becomes more intricate as it grows larger.

Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez