Kettering

“Kettering” is the first real song on Hospice — a concept record about a hospital worker and a terminally ill patient, written in the aftermath of a relationship Peter Silberman was processing in the only way he knew how. Five minutes of keyboard drone and Silberman singing in a voice so held-back it sounds like he’s telling the story for the first time.

The song moves in slow waves, finally arriving at a burst of guitar distortion that functions as the moment the narrator first understood what he had walked into. It’s the kind of song that belongs to a specific cold morning — the one where you admit something to yourself that you’ve been refusing to name for months.