The Musical Metamorphosis of Diana Silvers

“There’s something about Diana Silvers that feels like the moving, breathing contents of a vintage picture frame. The grainy particles dancing across the film camera, capturing Silvers’s often contemplative, sometimes playful expression, look like they could be part of her—silver halide crystals sparkling beneath her skin.”

These are the first words I typed in my Notes app after watching the multi-hyphenate’s music video for “Airplane,” a paramount track from her debut album, From Another Room. Silvers, a model, actress, and newly minted musician, has just completed yet another phase of her creative metamorphosis. Her gossamer wings are spreading into the music industry, and she has a bright and shiny record to prove it. Mind you, it’s her third act at just 28 years of age.

I first “met” the burgeoning star and forever fashion person when I watched Booksmart in my sophomore year of college, where Silvers graced the screen as the leather-clad cool girl Hope, fashioned by director Olivia Wilde. “Low-key, I think that Hope would fuck with my record,” she later tells me with a laugh. I’d grown used to seeing her face in luxury campaigns and on runways, walking and posing for names like Prada, Celine, and Stella McCartney. However, I actually met the ever-evolving star during a laid-back video call, revealing a sweater-clad Silvers with her arms poetically draped over an acoustic guitar. The Los Angeles–born star is very New York in her ways, as she joined our call early to workshop a few chords. “It’s a little cliché, but I honestly really just enjoy doing it,” she laughs. “It’s the first and last thing I do every day.”

We’re chatting only nine days after her 28th birthday, which she says she spent lying on her friend’s red light therapy mat, eating princess cake, and watching the Timberwolves vs. Nets game. “I love the NBA,” she says with a drawl. Silvers speaks about her favorite teams—the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks, and Minnesota Timberwolves (where her dad is from)—with the same fervor as her favorite books. Her shelf, she tells me, is currently stacked with Murray Stein’s Jung’s Map of the Soul, Jon Krakauer’s Classic Krakauer, and Cameron Crowe’s The Uncool, to name a few. I tell her this makes sense—her songwriting sounds like she reads good books. And I’m not just buttering the star up. Silvers’s ethereal sound and poignant lyricism are unexpected yet unsurprising talents in her arsenal.

If you’re wondering where the curious actress had time to become a singer, songwriter, and producer while simultaneously working on another project (she was shooting Netflix‘s Lena Headey–led American Western series The Abandons when this record began to bubble up inside of her), get in line. The truth is that Silvers didn’t try to write an album. Actually, she didn’t even try to write a song. “I wrote ‘Airplane’ on September 22, 2024—I know because I have it in my diary—and I remember it kind of scared me,” she tells me, the sanctity of it settling into her voice. “It wasn’t that I sat down and wrote lyrics and then wrote a song. I started these chords, and then I was like, ‘I think something’s coming.'”

The track “Airplane” came out of Silvers “like an emergency,” she writes in an Instagram caption, but the way she describes it to me sounds like a sonic release—lyrics, chords, and choked-up sentiments that she couldn’t seem to keep down. “Most of my songs don’t really follow a format because they tend to be more stream of consciousness,” she explains. “Then I come to, and I’m like, ‘Oh, cool. A song just happened.'” This process seemed to resemble The Artist’s Way–esque morning pages for the singer during the time of Donald Trump’s presidential reelection: a form of therapy, an unleashing of trapped creativity and pent-up frustration. “I remember listening back to [“Airplane”], and I was like, ‘Whoa, okay. I just learned something about myself and about how I’m feeling,'” she says.

On its surface, the track is a symphony of sweet guitar chords with a nostalgic graininess. Her soft vocals are colored with Alanis Morissette–like lilts and instrumentals accented by her beloved childhood instrument, the cello. As I dove deeper into the lyrics, I was swept into the undercurrents of pain rippling through the feathery melody, words Silvers describes as a protest woven into a pretty lullaby.