Let Me Be A Friend For Lost Time

This is a long-form recording made over the winter of 2025-2026. Similar to the experiments on Exactly and However, it’s composed of words and ideas I’ve collected over time, either through writing or singing habits. It’s a restrictive, one-take recording, subtly manipulated afterward, with drastically reconstituted parts by Christy Armstrong and Tolly Kaiser. There’s only one guitar, recorded live with my voice, yet I hope it feels like a conversation or even a group dance.

Though the ideas of the song move toward and away from coherence, my basic urge was to express frustration at the stunting of our senses in the digital age. Sometimes that frustration is pointed at myself, sometimes at others, often at large systemic forces like the “attention economy.” I planned this song for release at our co-op, and cooperative participation has truly felt—I think for many of us—like an opportunity to create something humane on the internet. I can’t say how much I enjoy having some power in the situation.

“For over eight minutes, Silver, aided by Christy Armstrong (drum programming) and Tolly Kaiser (bassoon), seems to assemble the song’s many layers in front of your ears. As he plays angular acoustic guitar, his halting attempts to ‘articulate my perspective’ are strangely moving.” – Jeremy Shatan (AnEarful)

Exactly and However

These songs, or what I called “contexts” at the time, are selections from unfinished draft recordings made in Olympia and Montreal between 2013 and 2017. I was for years completely detached from verse-chorus songwriting, except to make Planet Made of Diamonds! with Sarah Hopp early in that timespan. I did all of my writing through recording, usually in short sections I stitched together to form a body. This album is made from selections-of-selections, then, and over many listens they have assumed an air of finished-ness.

Most of the words are from journals I kept for the project, though plenty of singing is impromptu or drawn from other iterations not written down. There are definitely themes that permeate them all, especially a lack of enthusiasm for mental abstractions. No pebble is actually a pebble. It’s a tool for understanding experience. This album of inquiring songs addresses that misconception.

Side A: 1-18
Side B: 19-34

Originally released in 2018 as No Guide: Sketches 2014-2017 Part 1 and Part 2.

Planet Made of Diamonds Twice the Size of Earth! (with Sarah Hopp)

Planet Made of Diamonds Twice the Size of Earth!, like much planetary matter, was born in a brief and fiery explosion but has since lived a long—and fairly uneventful—life in the universe. In the fall of 2012, when Sarah Hopp was studying at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, she came to Alex Silver with news from National Geographic: a planet made of diamonds twice the size of our own was discovered by scientists looking into the sky. Very hard and rare carbon, valued dearly on Earth, was floating through Outer Space all nonchalant…

Alex slammed a few stupid chords on the guitar in honor of the news and the two singers repeated what became the title of the album, over and over, for approximately one week, writing together all of the lyrics and melodies that would fill out the world of these songs. Through that winter, Alex recorded bits and pieces with a mic borrowed from the owner of Dumpster Values and frontwoman of Broken Water (a nice mic from Sarah’s boss!) and the first song to congeal into form was “Long Stretch of Fog.”

By spring of 2013, having sung the album many times in a special living room for just a few important friends, there was a proper record of the celestial event. On the final day before moving to Ann Arbor for the summer, the singers were still recording vocals and the clang of house-packing can be heard in the background of certain tracks.

The album sat, naturally, in Alex’s hands for many years until he picked it up again while studying French in Montreal (2017), projecting giant footage of Earth as seen from the International Space station on his Petite Italie apartment wall and editing. By the next summer, in Santa Fe (2018), he released it.

Come 2024, it is now available to widely stream/download/buy and we hope that 12 years is not its half-life, but merely the opening of its fragile eyes. Enjoy and beware the perils of diamond consciousness. 

Dream Without Detail

I’m so happy – and relieved – to be sharing Dream Without Detail in a wider form. This is my most produced album, but I didn’t release it for many years after it was finished. I made it with the help of Chris Bathgate and Keith Kinnear at Chris’ lake ‘haus’ in Pinckney. What started as a weekend session grew into a project that spanned through the summer.

I think these songs exemplify my songwriting in my early 20s, almost like a waypoint before I changed course and started writing songs of a very different sort. I’m very proud of these tracks, but it took a long time to reckon with them. It’s a “breakup” album and after it was finished I wanted to forget the emotions. I think I made the mistake of forgetting that other people might benefit from my work.

The songs also deal with alienation and longing for the world – physical, spiritual, psychic – a theme that consequently became very dear to me.

Connor Dodson is the absolutely indispensable drummer and guitarist who made the title track what it is. Chris’ production, especially on Dream Without Detail, encouraged me to open up on electric guitar, which also gave that song its personality. I thank him deeply for seeing the potential of these songs, including for all the years I kept them hidden. Keith Kinnear, the engineer, was extremely disciplined in the details and all of the tracks were transformed by his insights and musicality. Andrew Frame, a real-life architect, “unfroze the music” with his idiosyncratic basslines ;) And I’m so grateful to Graham Parsons and Andy Catlin for their essential atmospherics on lap steel and synth. This really was a privilege in my life. Thanks also to Zach Nichols and Matthew Milia, who contributed to sessions in the early stages of creation. To Sarah, Anthony, and Maggie, who most helped me realize what this was.