_This week, Dive is bringing you three Q&As from artists playing Moogfest, the electronic music festival that starts Friday night in Asheville and runs through Sunday.
First off is Peter Silberman, guitarist, singer and frontman for The Antlers. He talked to Assistant Diversions Editor Allison Hussey about the band’s goings-on in the months since its release of its second album, Burst Apart. _
DIVERSIONS: What have you liked most about making music?
PETER SILBERMAN: It’s hard to say. In the grand scheme of things, I think the fact that I’m just getting to do this at all is my favorite part of it. I’ve played guitar pretty much my whole life and never expected that I would get to do it for a living, but I’ve always wanted to. So that’s definitely part of it.
Having a good show, having a show where we feel really connected to the audience, and we’ve enjoyed ourselves while we were playing it. That’s definitely up there on the list.
And just seeing pretty much the whole world has got to be up there, too, because I never expected to travel as much as I am in my life. I remember when I was in school, my mom was always urging me to do a study abroad program, and I was just sort of like, “Nah, I don’t think so, I think I’ll just stay in New York. Whatever.” Then right out of college, I ended up traveling so much. It’s kind of crazy.
DIVERSIONS: Why did you want to involve fans with the “#burstapart” hashtag on Twitter?
PS: Originally, I think it came out of that we had this domain name that we had used around the launch of the record for the record that was kind of laying dormant, now that it had been out for a while. We figured we might as well do something with it.
We’ve been, for better or worse, a pretty active band on Twitter, to the point where we think we’re funny and most people probably think we’re annoying.
We’ve always liked having a certain degree of transparency and collaboration with people that are listening, because I think a lot of our career and a lot of the way our music has caught on has been because people found some of themselves in it. So this is just a silly little way of doing that online.
