I wasted my first semester of college pursuing a degree in business, and I remember the thing that made me snap out of this vague pipe dream of becoming a guy who walks around with a big dumb brief case and says things like “monetize” and “deliverables” and uses screencaps from The Wolf of Wall Street paired with motivational phrases as my Facebook header image was an accounting class I bombed. I thought there was something so satisfying about balancing a ledger—essentially working out a complex math problem with only one definite answer, an adult form of sticking the peg in the correctly shaped hole in one of those puzzles for babies. Instead, I got so frustrated with those problems that I dropped out of the program and studied English, a field that hammers home the idea that there is no peg nor puzzle in life, only the illusion that such structures exist.
Though Shalom Toy captures this exact frustration on “Same Side,” her latest single as Silvering, she explores these ideas with impressive grace—the track sounds vaguely lenient on Radiohead or even Coldplay in the same way IAN SWEET’s music is, while Toy’s longing vocals recall those of Soccer Mommy. All of which is written out in an intentionally honest light, with Toy’s heartfelt lyrics pairing well with dramatic string arrangements courtesy of Collin Dupree.
“There are moments where I wish life could adhere to certain constants the way that math does—where a double negative off paper could cancel itself out and become positive without the toll of grief or breaking down,” she shares. “Things that feel like too much wouldn’t be so bad to go through, but there would be a price attached to putting a cap on pain. ‘Same Side’ passes over some darker feelings I’ve felt while trying to remain open to catching and appreciating moments of sunlight through them. Depicting that contrast truthfully and not burying pieces of myself. When I write I want to capture my weight in honesty before I do anything else.”
You can stream the track below, and purchase it here.
