New York-based musician Fiona Silver knows well what it's like to be stuck inside a prison of your own making. She explores this feeling and more in the song and video for "Hostage of Love," premiering today on PAPER.
Silver's new single is the title track of her latest EP, which was fittingly released on Valentine's Day. Sonically, "Hostage of Love" marries a genre agnostic sound incorporating doo-wop, soul, and girl-group pop with a tale as old as time. "I've been tied up, tape over my mouth, my bones are weary," she sings. It's all about the ways love can be all-consuming to her detriment.
Silver enlisted director and New York artist Kendra Morris to helm the "Hostage of Love" video. They intended to create a video that felt as literal as the song's themes of being trapped in love are, so there are colorful scenes of Silver, styled like a vintage-meets-modern rock queen, being tied up and panicking as the walls around her close in.
"I feel like that's something that almost comes up in my dreams sometimes," Silver says. "Where I feel like I'm in a space and I'm trying to get out, and I can't. I think that sometimes we're trapped in these emotional cycles. Love is such a beautiful thing, it's something everyone aspires to and wants in their lives, but there's all these other sides to love...and there's a dark side. I've had relationships where the dream of what I could be with someone else was so alluring to me, that I couldn't see the reality of it."
In the song, Silver sings "Heaven when I close my eyes, I wake up my hands are tied." That line is about "the dream and the fantasy because the reality is unbearable," she explains.
Silver will be hosting a Hostage of Love EP release party on March 8, and all proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood and RAINN, the organization providing resources to sexual abuse survivors and educational tools about sexual violence. See the flyer below, and get tickets here.
Photography: Cortney Armitage