Getting Closer: Silver & Gold Finds Success in Taking Chances

When the indie rockers in the five-piece Colorado band Silver & Gold began thinking about their latest EP, Color, it was 2017, and they were right in the middle of recording a full-length album. The process was taking longer than they anticipated, and their success at the local level had them thinking big-picture.

When the group opened for a band called CIVILIAN, which was on tour through Colorado in March of 2017. Dan Diaz, CIVILIAN's bass player and an engineer at Sound Stage Studios in Nashville, took a liking to Silver & Gold's soulful indie rock.

The bands stayed in touch — and when Silver & Gold guitarist and singer Devon Hildebrandt and drummer Taylor Drose happened to be in Nashville that summer, they checked out Diaz’s studio. After a chat about Silver & Gold's goals and everything Diaz was doing at Sound Stage, Hildebrandt and Drose were sold on the chance to record live as a band. They decided to book some studio time in Nashville, even though they had other commitments in Denver and almost no new material.

It was a calculated move. They gave themselves a year to sort out the details and to finish an album that they had written and were recording in Colorado, Point A – Point A. The record, made with members of the band Overslept, came out in the beginning of 2018. With only six months until they were due in Nashville, the members of Silver & Gold wasted no time in writing new material for that session. “While we were recording Point A – Point A, we were writing a new EP. We became a lot more deliberate with our writing process, and it was really great," says Hildebrandt.


Recording with Diaz at Sound Stage would turn out to be both an exhaustive and a rewarding experience for Silver & Gold. Instead of building each song track by track, as is commonly done in smaller studios, “we were all in our own separate little spaces, we had a metronome in our ear, and we tracked and recorded together,” says Hildebrandt.

On top of five days of recording, they did three days of pre-production with Diaz, who brought an outside ear to their songs. “That was a very challenging and invigorating experience, and very humbling. Every day, someone in the band would leave and be like, ‘I just got my ass kicked. I need to go home and practice,’” says Hildebrandt.

In the end, the hard work paid off. A single from the EP, "Feel a Little Closer," has reached over 120,000 streams on Spotify.

“All five of us are so proud of the music we put out," says Hildebrandt. "We think it’s the best we’ve ever done on all levels. As individual musicians, we challenged ourselves a lot."

Silver & Gold, 3:30 p.m. Saturday, May 25, Denver Day of Rock, 16th Street Mall, Curtis Street Stage, free.