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What Silence Doesn’t Say

Edward Schooley
Posted: September 25, 2026
Perhaps the greatest mistake we make with silence is believing it has only one meaning. - Guitar Thrills Magazine

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EDITOR IN CHIEF | OWNER | GUITAR THRILLS MAGAZINE TAMPA, FL U.S.A.

Edward Schooley

Founded in 2021. GUITAR THRILLS MAGAZINE of Tampa, FL Guitar Thrills Magazine of Tampa, FL U.S.A. The GUITAR THRILLS MAGAZINE is excited to bring you some of the music industries finest talent. Including the world of entertainment. Our focus includes the long term goals and aspirations of artists of all sorts. We are an unbiased reporting platform. You are getting insight into the world of music. No, we are not your fathers website for music news. We have grown into our own, and rely upon decades of music experience and knowledge. Guitar Thrills Magazine is a hard act to follow.

Silence is rarely as empty as it appears. Sometimes it is protection. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it is the space someone needs before they are ready to say what they actually feel. And sometimes, silence is simply a choice—to keep something private when the world expects an explanation. But silence can also leave something behind.

I have thought about this often through my work interviewing artists for Guitar Thrills Magazine. Over the years, I've learned that getting an answer and getting the answer are not always the same thing. An artist can be willing to talk. They can respond to every question. Nothing is refused. And yet, something can still feel missing. Sometimes an answer fills the space without really entering it.

Most readers may never notice. But when you've spent years reading an artist's work, listening to their music, studying the way they communicate, and becoming familiar with their voice, you begin to recognize the gray areas. You notice when the language changes. You notice when an answer becomes unusually careful. You notice when a question that could have gone deeper is met with just enough to move past it. The silence speaks volumes.

But what does it actually say?

That is where things become complicated. Silence is not evidence by itself. An omission isn't automatically a confession, and a guarded answer doesn't necessarily mean someone is hiding something. There can be perfectly legitimate reasons for not going further. An artist may have learned that vulnerability comes with a price. They may have been misunderstood before. They may not trust the person asking the question. They may be protecting someone else. They may be protecting themselves. Or perhaps they simply don't want to talk about it.

IThat should be enough. Everyone is entitled to a private room inside themselves that no interviewer, friend, partner, reader, or stranger has a right to enter. But respecting someone's silence doesn't mean silence has no meaning. It can still change the relationship between people.

We often think communication consists of words. We ask a question, someone answers, and we move forward. But real communication is rarely that clean. There is the answer. There is the hesitation before the answer. There is what gets emphasized. There is what gets avoided. There is the sudden change of subject. And then there is what never gets said at all.

Sometimes we don't even realize we're listening to those things until afterward. Perhaps that's because we instinctively try to complete unfinished stories. When someone leaves a space in a conversation, we want to fill it. We construct explanations. We look at what we know and try to make sense of what we don't. And that can be dangerous. We can mistake our interpretation for someone else's truth.

A silence may mean pain. It may mean anger. It may mean indifference. It may mean nothing more complicated than, I don't want to talk about this. We don't always get to know which one. That uncertainty is part of what makes silence so powerful. It forces us to confront something we don't particularly like: we cannot always know what another person is thinking. We can observe. We can listen. We can ask. But eventually, there is a boundary beyond which another person's interior life belongs only to them.

And perhaps that boundary deserves more respect than we sometimes give it.

There is a difference, however, between respecting someone's silence and ignoring what that silence does to us. If someone chooses not to explain themselves, the other person still has to live with the unanswered question. If someone withdraws without explanation, the absence itself becomes part of the story. If a relationship changes and one person refuses to discuss why, the person left behind may spend days, weeks, or even years wondering what happened.

The silence doesn't necessarily tell them the answer. But it tells them that an answer isn't being offered.

That distinction matters.

Depeche Mode captured something remarkably similar in the video for “Enjoy the Silence.” David Gahan appears as a king, wearing a crown and royal clothing, wandering through enormous, empty landscapes with nothing but a deck chair. The crown suggests power, status, importance. Yet there is no kingdom. Nothing to conquer. No audience. He is simply looking for somewhere to sit.

The image is almost humorous, but underneath it is something profound. All the symbols of importance become insignificant against the silence. The crown says one thing. The empty landscape says another. The deck chair says something simpler still: perhaps what he really wants is peace.

The song itself tells us that words can become unnecessary—that they can even do harm. But silence can do that too.

Music understands this instinctively. A guitarist doesn't fill every second with notes. A songwriter doesn't explain every emotion. Sometimes the space between the notes is where the emotion lives. The pause can make the next note matter more.

People can be like that.

There are things we say, things we deliberately don't say, and things that exist somewhere between the two.

As an interviewer, I've learned not to immediately assume that the unanswered question is the most important one. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the more revealing thing is simply noticing that the conversation stopped there. You don't have to force the door open. You don't have to accuse someone of hiding something. You can simply recognize that the door exists.

That, too, is listening.

Perhaps the greatest mistake we make with silence is believing it has only one meaning. It doesn't. Silence can be kindness. It can be self-preservation. It can be uncertainty. It can be rejection. It can be grief. It can be restraint. It can be exhaustion. It can be a boundary. And sometimes it can be a message delivered without words.

The difficulty is that the person receiving the silence doesn't always get to choose what it means to them. They can respect it and still feel hurt by it. They can understand it and still miss what was there before. They can accept someone's right to remain silent while wishing they had been given one honest sentence.

Those things can exist at the same time.

Maybe that's the real lesson in silence. We don't have to decode every quiet moment. We don't have to turn every omission into a revelation. And we shouldn't mistake our assumptions for another person's truth. But neither should we pretend that silence is nothing.

Because sometimes the most important part of a conversation isn't what was said.

It's the moment when someone stopped saying it.

Silence doesn't always tell us what is behind the wall.

But it tells us the wall is there.

And sometimes, that is what silence doesn't say that says the most.

PRS Standard 24 Review from Guitar Thrills Magazine Tampa, FL The World of Rock and Blues Magazine.

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