Lily Cornell Silver
March 24, 2026
Lily Cornell Silver Emery Lemos* Lily Cornell Silver, daughter of the late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, grew up feeling shy about making her own music. “There’s such a looming shadow that it felt like pressure I’d never be able to live up to,” she says. “It felt really sacred.” But in the fall of 2021, while attending college in Southern California, Silver’s friends Luis Verdin and Alex Albrecht talked her into forming a band. This time, after years of making her own music privately, she considered it. “It was my first time, to use a therapy term, to do ‘opposite action,'” Silver says. “Even though all these feelings inside are telling me I’m not good enough to do it, I know it makes me happy, so I’m going to do it anyway.”
The trio had the same drummer in mind: Graham Derzon-Supplee, who had Seattle-area roots like Silver. They called themselves Josie on the Rocks and swiftly started writing songs and playing small gigs. For Silver, who was struggling with her mental health post-Covid and still grieving her father’s death, the band gave her a sense of purpose. “It really saved me,” she says. “Having that to do every day took me out of my head and out of my own world.”
Then tragedy struck. In July 2022, a few weeks after Josie and the Rocks filmed a video for their song “Not You,” Derzon-Supplee died in a tragic accident. Silver and her bandmates were overcome with grief. Although Silver had spent months normalizing talk of mental health by hosting Mind Wide Open, a podcast that featured guests like Eddie Vedder, Duff McKagan, and medical professionals, she found herself in uncharted territory when coming to grips with an accidental death.
At her lowest point, the 25-year-old entered inpatient therapy, a prospect that initially terrified her. Ultimately, the experience helped her to find herself again.
She and her former bandmates all live in different places now, and all make music on their own — Silver also manages folk group the Brudi Brothers — but they recently released Josie on the Rocks’ music, beginning with “Not You” and another song, “Super Sonic,” as a celebration of Derzon-Supplee’s life. “Not You” is a lilting meditation on a toxic friendship (“I won’t wait around for you,” Silver sings, “It’s not why I do what I do”) bolstered by Derzon-Supplee’s steady beats.
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“A few days after the release, ‘Not You’ played on the radio in L.A.,” guitarist Verdin tells Rolling Stone. “This was a huge milestone for us as a band, and I listened with lots of excitement. But by the time the song was over, I felt Graham’s absence more poignantly than I had at any other point during the release. This feeling was always there; we were always meant to share these experiences with Graham. But there was a distinct finality to this moment.… There’s also been a deep sense of catharsis and healing through sharing our music with the world.”
“The dream we had begun to build as a band was beginning to take shape when Graham died, and his life ending while ours simply continued made it all the more crushing and confusing to pick up the pieces,” Albrecht, who played bass in the band, adds. “I bear unending gratitude towards Lily and Luis for the love and compassion we’ve held for one another through the incredibly difficult grief of the last few years.”
In her own words, Silver tells how therapy and time helped her feel comfortable to revisit this time in her life.
When I met Graham in college, he was roommates with one of my best friends from high school. He was in their dorm room sitting on a beanbag chair, wearing Crocs and a Snuggie, reading National Geographic. So I already knew I had to get to know him. And then he asked, “Do you want to see all my lizards?” It’s lizard climate where we went to school, and he’d scout the campus and bring them to his room where he had little terrariums set up.
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He was a true listener and naturally incredibly curious. I’m someone who tends to open up less about my family history or my dad in a social context unless I really know somebody. But he was able to ask questions that, I think if anyone else asked them, would feel invasive. They never fazed me because you could just tell they came from such a genuine, earnest place of curiosity and of wanting to get to know you. I was able to be a more uninhibited friend with him, and in turn a more uninhibited musician. The only time I can remember him being genuinely upset with me was during a conversation where I said I thought someone was boring. He thought it was impossible for anyone to be boring.
Graham was really the heart of the band; I think we all would agree on that. He was an incredible drummer. He didn’t play any melodic instruments, but he had a great sense of melody. So we would write these songs, and he’d hear a note he wanted to change, and then I’d have to play a chromatic scale on the piano until he stopped me at the note he wanted to replace it with. Quality over speed. He had all this confidence, really strong opinions, and boundless excitement about music.
I’ve struggled against my desire to make music my whole life; I felt so much pressure that if I’m going to pursue music in any capacity, there’s forever going to be a shadow that comes with undue expectation, and after my dad passed, that it would always have to be associated with the trauma of losing him. I never talked publicly about being in a band because I was having too much fun. I was scared to ruin something that felt sacred by opening the door to judgment from people who have an opinion on me before they’ve ever heard me play. It was Graham’s confidence in my ability that got me to a place where I could set the pressure aside and make my own music because I love to. Playing music brought him, Alex, and Luis so much joy that it was a reminder that it didn’t need to carry such a heavy weight.
“Not You” was the first song we wrote as a band. It’s a pure representation of how each of us, musically, could come together. The song is about anyone who’s caused you pain for no clear reason, which I think is something most people can relate to. The other song, “Super Sonic,” is an ode to Seattle’s lost NBA team, which fewer people can probably relate to, but is emotional, nonetheless. I feel so lucky to have the “Not You” music video, made by my friend Hope Alexander. We finished shooting it in July 2022, less than a week before Graham passed. Having that footage of him playing, and all of us together, ended up being a massive gift.
Graham’s death was a freak accident and completely unexpected. Our community didn’t have a choice but to hold onto each other. I actually just had dinner with his parents and his brother [musician Cory Derzon] over the weekend, and I kind of dragged Cory and his friends to an annual Balkan music festival in Seattle. The day that Graham passed, through all of our shock and acute trauma, his parents said to Luis, Alex, and me, “We’re adopting you guys.” And they’ve been family ever since. Graham’s family has shown more care and selflessness than I knew was humanly possible to do when something like this happens.
A month after he passed, Alex, Luis, and I, and the majority of Graham’s friends, had to start our senior year of college. At first, we’d all have dinners or moments set aside to get together for the purpose of talking about Graham. Right after someone passes, I think everyone tends to be on a similar page grieving-wise. But as time goes on, people need to process in different ways. For some, it feels better not to sit in it, and for others, all you want to do is talk about it. Both of those feelings can be really isolating.
Doing my podcast, Mind Wide Open, helped with the grief of losing my dad amongst many other people I love. The goal was to work against the difficulties that come with accessing mental health care by creating a free, centralized resource of experts and public figures for anyone who wanted it, but I also learned so much personally through the interviews. I connected really deeply with Taylor Momsen from the Pretty Reckless. She’d been on tour with Soundgarden when my dad passed, and really loved him and the band. One of the main things she talked about in our interview was her dear friend and producer Kato [Khandwala] passing away in an accident. She didn’t listen to music for months afterwards, and it completely changed her relationship with making music. She was one of the first people I talked to after Graham passed and is still steadfast in my life in a beautiful way.
A few months after returning to college I had to get surgery for a broken ankle. Not being mobile meant sitting with my thoughts a lot more. I spiraled pretty quickly into the worst depressive episode I’ve ever had. I don’t think I recognized it then, but any sense I’d had that things happened for a reason was shattered. I couldn’t find purpose in doing anything while knowing that the most important pieces of your life can be taken at random. I was having panic attacks in every class, and generally just became pretty nonfunctioning. All I wanted was to finish college alongside my community of Graham’s people. My mom [Alice in Chains and Soundgarden manager Susan Silver] came to school to help take care of me for a bit. She’s actually a saint; anyone who has met her knows she’s likely the most giving, patient person on the planet. She was desperately trying to find the right resource for me, and two different psychiatrists she’d called said it seemed like the clearest option was inpatient care. My immediate response was, “Absolutely not.” I wanted to stay the course and finish college, but I also had so much internalized stigma around that kind of treatment.
I think of myself as someone that’s very open, mental health–wise, but I felt like the idea of going into treatment said something scary about me to other people, as well as to myself. I didn’t want to be a person who’s so broken that they have to go away somewhere and be isolated from their environment to seek treatment. The whole process was shrouded in mystery to me. The only person in my age range who I’d known to speak about their experience in inpatient was Eileen Kelly, on her podcast, Going Mental. Honestly, at the time I don’t think I even remembered what she’d said about her experience, but having the knowledge that someone I liked had done it and was on the other side of it made it seem less terrifying.
Josie on the Rocks: Alex Albrecht, Lily Cornell Silver, Graham Derzon-Supplee, and Luis Verdin (from left) Emery Lemos* I ended up finding a treatment program through a family friend. As cliché as it sounds, it quite literally saved my life. The barrier to entry for programs like that is so high, and I’m abundantly lucky that I had the resources to do it at all, nonetheless find one that fit me well personally.
The woman who runs the program is trained in neurobiology. She was able to explain what was going on in me, chemically, biologically, and neurologically in a way that was really empathetic, but also intellectual. It helped me a lot to have some clinical understanding of what was happening in my nervous system and fight/flight/freeze response. It brought a little peace of mind. I initially pleaded to do the outpatient program; they were gentle but realistic about my situation, saying, “You can accept help. You can be inpatient and it doesn’t mean you’re a lost cause.” They assisted people with basic life tasks like providing meals and administering medication, amongst several therapeutic modalities. As much as I didn’t want to admit it at the time, I really needed that.
When I started the program, I was pretty certain about two things: “I’m not going to be here more than a month, and I’m not going to be able to make any friends.” I was wrong on both counts. The people I met there were really special, really thoughtful, and funny, as well as able to hold space for the suffering around them amid their own. Looking back, it seems obvious that when you’re at your lowest, you have such heightened empathy for people in that same place, and that’s what they showed me. I ended up doing most of my college thesis from the inpatient program. I couldn’t be on campus for one of my initial presentations, and some of the people I was in the program with had me present it to them instead. It was probably really boring, and thinking about it still makes me teary with gratitude.
There was a music therapy program a couple of times a week. A guy would come in and lead a group of patients with the goal of writing a song together. No lofty expectations, just whatever music came through collectively. There were people who’d never touched an instrument or were (by definition) tone-deaf, and a couple who were professional musicians. We’d usually end up writing a song by the end of the session and recording it.
The first time I went to music therapy group, I was still on crutches. You know things are rough when the other patients in a mental-health program feel bad for you. I was reluctant to go because my grief associated with music was so freshly wounded, but one of the therapists there encouraged me. We wrote a collaborative song; I sang and played the piano. When the session was up, I stood up and walked out of the room. I got halfway down the hall before I realized, “Oh, my God. I forgot my crutches. I forgot I can’t walk right now.” Music therapy was a large part of what brought me back to my body and into the real world.
Graham Derzon-Supplee Billy Keogh* When I started my podcast in 2020, three years had gone by since my dad had passed. In the grief world, that’s no time at all. I had to have a lot of empathy for myself at the time, and eventually admit when I needed to step away from the project because I couldn’t sustain it emotionally anymore. Doing the podcast helped me realize when I went into inpatient, just because I need this now doesn’t mean I’ll need it forever. But if my body is saying I need space to sit with everything I’m feeling, there’s not much of a choice.
As the years have gone by since Graham’s death, Alex, Luis, and I are still very much family. The best time of my life was spent with those three boys, and I think the world of them. In the past year, we’ve talked about how good it would feel to have this part of Graham’s legacy, something he was proud of, out in the world, now that the trauma is not as fresh.
After somebody dies, I don’t think it’s always beneficial to frame things through the lens of “They would’ve wanted this” or “They wouldn’t have wanted that.” I’ve had that put on me a lot, especially around my dad, like, “This is what your dad would’ve wanted.” I think that can be more harmful than good a lot of the time. But to completely contradict myself in this case, I really think Graham would be bummed if he knew that everything about our music had come to a halt once he was gone. He was so excited to release it. I want people to be able to access it, see Graham playing the drums, and hear the songs that he is so woven into. Releasing this music is a new part of our grief process.
