Lily Cornell Silver opened up in an essay about how seeking help changed her life for the better after traged
Chris Cornell’s daughter Lily Cornell Silver is opening up about one of the great tragedies of her life — and how inpatient mental health treatment “quite literally saved” her
When Lily, 25, started a band in 2021 with her college friends, including drummer Graham Derzon-Supplee, she realized she could find joy in making music, regardless of any pressures placed upon her by her family name (Dad Chris, who died by suicide in 2017, was the beloved frontman of Soundgarden and Audioslave, while mom Susan Silver is a noted music manager).
But when Derzon-Supplee died at 23 of an accidental drowning “freak accident” in July 2022, less than a week after their band shot their first music video, Lily was thrown for a loop.
“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,” she wrote in a first-person piece published in Rolling Stone on Tuesday, March 24. “I couldn’t find purpose in doing anything while knowing that the most important pieces of your life can be taken at random.”
In the piece, Lily fondly recalls her first meeting with Derzon-Supplee, whom she praised as a “true listener” and “the heart” of their band, Josie on the Rocks.
She wrote that his confidence in her musical ability finally got her to a point where she could “set the pressure aside and make my own music because I love it,” after a lifetime of fearing that anything she ever made would be associated with her father and the “trauma of losing him.”
