How Peter Silberman Lost His Hearing, Then Rediscovered Sound
Photo by Justin Hollar
Peter Silberman didn’t always have to worry about his hearing. He’d been making music as The Antlers since his first self-released record in 2006, Uprooted. Over the years, his career with the Brooklyn indie-folk outfit blossomed as he added members (drummer Michael Lerner and multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci), recorded four more albums and toured the globe. But one day in 2014, shortly after releasing his band’s most recent work, Familiars, he woke up to ear pain and extreme sound sensitivity. He couldn’t even stand to hear his own voice.
After seeking medical advice, the 30-year-old frontman was ultimately diagnosed with tinnitus (ringing in the ear), Hyperacusis (an increased sensitivity to certain frequency and volume ranges of sound) and Cochlear Hydrops (an atypical form of Meniere’s Disease). He was distraught. What does a career musician do when told that his or her hearing suddenly, without warning, has become permanently impaired? Even worse, what do they do when their own singing voice causes pain?
He had a choice: give up, or teach himself a new way to sing and play that wouldn’t aggravate his illness. Silberman chose the latter. He left Brooklyn in 2015 and retreated to a peaceful cabin in upstate New York, where he wrote his debut solo album, Impermanence, out today via Anti- Records. The title both straightforwardly deals with the idea of transition: adjusting to the new normal within his own person. “I was reading a lot of things about impermanence and trying to apply it to this situation,” he tells Paste over the phone from his new studio in Rosendale. “I was thinking about how it could be a reassuring thought that this really challenging period was going to pass. But it’s also in reference to the period before this happened, which was a period of relative stability. You can always count on change and if you ever get too comfortable.”
To that end, Impermanence features six spare, whisper-soft ballads accompanied by feathery nylon-string acoustic guitar strums. Each shows Silberman in various stages healing and acceptance, like the single “Karuna,” which has him contending with bodily breakdown: “I’m disassembling piece by piece… deteriorating, decayed, decreased…”
We called up Silberman to learn more about his solo debut. In our conversation, he brings us up to speed on the healing process, experimenting with the absence of sound on Impermanence and where he’ll take The Antlers from here.
Paste: How’s your week going?
Peter Silberman: It’s going pretty well. I’m in the studio right now and I’m getting back into some daily routines after just getting moved in. But yeah, it’s nice. It’s really cold and grey, which is good motivation to be inside and work.
Paste: I know you moved upstate, whereabouts are you?
Silberman: At the moment I’m outside of a town called Rosendale, which is about two hours from the city. I just moved into this place a couple weeks ago. Before that I was just kind of floating around, staying with friends and family and doing some sublets and stuff like that.
Paste: A lot of this album is about your dealing with hearing loss and tinnitus. When did you first realize that this was going to be a problem?
Silberman: Pretty immediately when it was all going down, which was two, no three, years ago, in 2014. Not too long after it started to go down I was like “Oh, what about music?”
Paste: Did you wake up one morning? Did it show up from out of the blue, or was it something that developed over time?
Silberman: It definitely came out of the blue, so it was a pretty sudden shift. My first considerations were “What do I do?” in the kind of general sense of asking, y’know, “How serious is this?” “Do I need to go to the doctor? Do I need to go to the hospital? What’s going on?” and then eventually, as I got a sense of what I was dealing with, came the questions of “Well, can this co-exist with music, which is such a dominant force in my life at this point?”
I think it’s probably a more widespread problem among musicians than is often talked about. I’m seeing more musicians talk about it, like y’know in this case they’ve been together for a really long time, and I think tinnitus is pretty common among those of us who have spent months on end in loud clubs and standing in front of crash cymbals and amplifiers.
Paste: When you would perform or go to shows, or just be in venues more often than not, did it ever occur to you to wear headphones, or earplugs, or something more protective?
Silberman: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the fact that [The Antlers] didn’t come off as an exceptionally loud band from an audience perspective is testament to us having really talented sound engineers working with us, and that’s a very important thing for a band, especially in our case. We were actually really loud on stage, our stage volume was very loud, and I recognized that early on and I did wear hearing protection for a little while, mostly in the ear that was facing the rest of the band. In our early days we were in sort of a triangle formation, so the left side of me was always facing Michael [Lerner] and Darby [Cicci], so for a while I did protect that ear, which is the same ear that ultimately gave me this issue. For a while after that I didn’t, and then when we went on tour for Familiars when I was in the midst of all this. I had pretty high-grade earplugs that I was wearing for every show. But it took a real incident to force me to be as diligent about this sort of stuff as I should be.