Philadelphia songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Marc Silver will release his eighth studio album, The Dark of Our Hymn, on November 6, 2026. Produced by longtime collaborators and fellow Philadelphians Andrew Lipke and Jaron Olevsky and mixed by Tucker Martine, the album features Silver’s ethereal combination of folk, Americana, bluegrass, blues and rock, surrounding his intimate, literary songwriting with a cinematic sense of space and detail.
The album’s first single, “Lily White”, is available now. Silver will celebrate the album’s release with a November 7 performance at The Black Squirrel Club in Philadelphia.
The Dark of Our Hymn explores mortality, memory, ancestry, queer love, a history of violence and the ways the dead remain with us. Mortality is everywhere on the album, but death is rarely treated as an ending. Instead, the songs return again and again to the question of what remains: memory, ancestry, devotion, beauty and connection. The record looks directly at impermanence without surrendering to despair, finding grace not outside of loss, but somewhere within it.
Moody and dark, evoking Joe Henry’s Scar, album opener “Ancestral” is the sole song Silver wrote during a brief ownership of a mandola. Inspired in part by Paul Burch’s “The Last of My Kind” and a lifelong fascination with what might be experienced in the moments between life and death, the song became a meditation on mortality.
“It’s a kind of prayer for a peaceful surrender, the hope that when breath and heart are finally still, we might feel ourselves returning to something ancient, familial and larger than ourselves,” Silver says. “At the same time, the song mourns everything death leaves unresolved: ‘a mess of dreams and unsown seams,’ the ambitions, relationships and unfinished pieces of a life that simply end when we do. Despite its subject, the song resolves into a major chord and hope, finding beauty in mortality and giving the album its title: ‘Though grievous flaws befall our hearts / There’s beauty in the dark of our hymn.’”
The waltz built on twangy guitars and a driving hi-hat, “Halos” grew out of a writing ritual the songwriter developed over the past few years: early morning walks with his dog and an audiobook, followed by a single page of uninterrupted free-writing before the rest of the day begins.
“This one was sparked by Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Quicksilver Daydreams of Maria,’ which sent my imagination toward two lovers and a woman of such mysterious, elemental beauty that the narrator understands his great fortune isn’t possessing her, but simply being allowed to witness and remain near her,” Silver says. “The song became an exploration of the strange solitude of being alive and the extraordinary comfort of finding someone whose presence can quiet that loneliness. It ultimately follows that love through loss and toward death, with the hope that somewhere beyond our own final dawning, the light of the person we loved might still be waiting for us.”
The album’s first single, “Lily White,” is built around a gentle acoustic riff and began with a glimmer of one of Silver’s earliest memories: playing outside with his childhood friend Mandy, chasing dragonflies and lightning bugs, catching tadpoles and frogs, climbing trees and getting muddy.
“Years later, while teaching young children, I watched a little boy in a tutu, high heels and a feathery crown lost in make-believe with a little girl dressed like a princess, and I stopped mid-conversation, grabbed a pen and began writing,” Silver says. “The song is about the innocence of childhood love and the absolute sincerity with which we once believed in fairy tales and forever, before growing older leaves us faded, jaded, worn and tired, but hopefully still tender enough to believe some of the fantastic might come true. The song nearly made several earlier records, but with Christian Sedelmyer’s strings, Jaron Olevsky’s piano and Bobby Baxmeyer’s dreamy guitars, it finally became what it had been waiting to be.”
The delicate sonic landscape of “Swinging Branches” may be the song Silver is most proud of, despite the gravity of its subject, because it first came to him as a love song about two men stealing away into a field to experience a tenderness the world has forbidden them.
“I could enter that secrecy through my own memories of being a gay man in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, while the song’s darker imagery was shaped by unforgettable photographs I encountered with my husband in a traveling exhibition on the history of lynching: bodies hanging from trees as white families gathered, took photographs and even made postcards of the spectacle,” Silver says. “What begins as an almost Edenic encounter between two lovers is overtaken by voices, torches, dogs, storms and violence until their tenderness is literally ripped from their grasp. When the crowd finally disappears, the song leaves the lovers together again beneath the stars, their suffering ended, peace restored, the stars bearing witness, a soft wind blowing among the branches as they bend and weep above them.”
A companion to the previous song, “Sullivan Ballou” is carried by ethereal piano melodies, the interleaving guitar of Clay Sears and a double bass melody played by Jeremy McDonald.
“Drawing from the tenderness and conviction of Sullivan Ballou’s final letter to his wife during the Civil War and Ken Burns’ documentary, I imagined a love letter from a soldier willing to leave behind his family and risk his life in service of the larger promise of freedom,” Silver says. “With its jazzy, almost Sade-like atmosphere and twisting, uneven measures, the song nearly defeated me in the studio, but the musicians believed in it when I was ready to give up, and I’m deeply grateful they did.”
A snakelike, distorted guitar line opens “Pleasuring,” a song inspired in part by Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek making music together.
“I became fascinated by their creative chemistry and by Adrianne’s fearless writing: sensual, androgynous, tender, playful, painful and unafraid of the body,” Silver says. “The song imagines two young artists finding one another, traveling, creating, loving and becoming catalysts for each other. In many ways, ‘Pleasuring’ is a thank-you for the permission Adrianne’s writing gave me to be more sensual and emotionally vulnerable in my own work.”
Somber and sparse, Silver’s voice is accompanied by acoustic guitar and piano at the start of “Veiled” before hollow-body jazz guitar, snare, kick and ethereal organ gradually expand the song’s cinematic landscape.
“By the time I was 19, I had already lost five people I was close to. Those early encounters with death came during a period of psychedelic exploration and an intense questioning of consciousness, while I was also developing a private inner world around hiding my sexuality. I think all of that made grief, and a curiosity about what might exist beyond it, an inevitable part of my writing,” Silver explains. “‘Veiled’ looks in on a dimly lit room where someone is inconsolable with loss, and the narrator can offer little more than presence: a ‘string and sail’ to hold her through it. From there, the song moves through the releasing of a loved one’s ashes beneath the northern lights and toward the recognition that a life contains many deaths but, if we’re lucky, many returns to light and love as well. It ends not in despair, but in a quiet willingness to endure the days still ahead and allow the heart, someday, to risk love again.”
Infused with the spirit of Laurel Canyon, “I Knew I’d Make You Mine” offers a moment of light amid The Dark of Our Hymn. With its warm, James Taylor-inspired feel, the song unexpectedly found its home after originally being written for another collection.
“The title came from something my oldest childhood friend once said about the first time he saw the woman he would eventually marry, and I built the song around that first kindling of attraction, when interest is returned and curiosity begins turning friendship into love,” Silver says. “By the second verse, though, his story had become my own: growing up never believing that lasting love, marriage or the stability of a family would be available to someone like me, and then finding all of it with my husband of 28 years, James Rose. The final line, ‘And I will always love you, my darling Rose,’ is my little nod to the life we somehow found together.”
The ethereal groove of “Skeleton Wings” originated with a major-seven chord, a melody built around wide intervals and one line: “When you leave, though I may fall apart.”
“That line first came from the possibility that my longtime bandmate Isaac Stanford might leave Philadelphia, but as I followed it, the song transformed into the imagined voice of a mother whose daughter has run away, leaving behind a painful tangle of love, anger, addiction, fear and things said and unsaid,” Silver says. “The ‘skeleton wings’ became a metaphor for the lies and defenses we build to protect ourselves: they may help us survive for a while, but they can’t help us fly. Ultimately, the song is about keeping the door open despite the wounds, trusting that love might lead someone home and give both people a second chance.”
Silver’s voice, coupled with Sarah Long’s duet vocal, is the centerpiece of album closer “When That Time Is Here and Now.”
“The aging and passing of our parents’ generation seemed to be everywhere: my childhood friend had just lost his mother, my own mother was turning 83, and the parents of my husband and close friends were beginning to need greater care,” Silver says. “I found myself thinking about how we once knew our parents at the age we are now, watching them work, struggle, play and raise us, and how almost imperceptibly we have become the generation receiving the torch as our elders begin to fade. Musically, I reached toward my jazz roots and the intimacy of Billie Holiday, borrowing an intervallic turn from the Beatles’ ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ when I became stuck at the bridge; the song nearly missed the album until Jaron Olevsky’s organ, Clay Sears’ jazz guitar and Sarah Long’s duet vocal finally revealed what it could be. As the album’s closing song, it returns once more to mortality, but with gratitude and acceptance: our elders ‘wade to fly,’ their songs remain with us, and someday we will follow them beyond the great divide.”
Marc Silver is a Philadelphia-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose work has evolved across more than two decades of writing, recording and performing. A graduate of the University of the Arts’ jazz program, Silver has released eight full-length albums, five as a solo artist and three with his longtime string band, The Stonethrowers. His music has appeared in film and television, and he has shared stages and festival bills with artists including Béla Fleck, Jerry Douglas, The Mavericks, Chuck Prophet and Sierra Hull, with appearances at festivals including the Philadelphia Folk Festival.
For more information, visit marcsilvermusic.com.
Album Release Show
Marc Silver — The Dark of Our Hymn Album Release Show
Saturday, November 7, 2026
7–11 p.m.
The Black Squirrel Club
Philadelphia, PA
Event information