For much of the first half of the twentieth century, it was possible for a curious listener to identify each of the constituent parts of a pop song. A hit such as Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart,” which sold more than a million copies in 1953, featured recognizable analog components: strings, horns, flute, brushes on a snare drum, Sinatra’s seductive, lilting vocal. Yet by 1955 the advent of multitrack recording, in which the various parts of a song could be captured separately and then braided together, meant that a recording was no longer merely the document of a live, synchronous performance. Auteurist producers such as Brian Wilson and Phil Spector came to think of sound as pliable—any piece of audio could be denatured and reconstructed. The old way, in which a finite number of fallible people played in a room until they got it right, had been obliterated.
In the past few decades, that sense of pliability has only ballooned. Technology has evolved so fast and so forcefully that the notion of going into a studio—a room in which trained professionals, seated behind a panel of glass, turn knobs and adjust levers—feels nearly quaint. Records can be made at home, using software such as Ableton Live or GarageBand, which can then be augmented with any number of plug-ins, expanding the palette of available sounds. Many of these production techniques were first adopted by hip-hop or electronic artists, but they are now ubiquitous; this means that trying to determine the origin of any single sound on a modern recording is difficult. Instrumentation, in the most general sense of the word, has become opaque. For fans who favor streaming services, the absence of liner notes, which once offered detailed production and songwriting credits, only exaggerates the mystery. Is that an actual violin, a synthesizer that sounds like a violin, a sample of a synthesizer that sounds like a violin, or a raccoon playing a kazoo that has been digitally manipulated to sound like a violin?
In 2014, the electronic musician Hrishikesh Hirway launched a biweekly podcast, “Song Exploder,” that works as a tonic for such confusion. Each episode sees a guest artist dissect a song he or she has written, recorded, or produced, considering the provenance and punch of its individual components. The premise might sound vaguely clinical, or even joyless—music, of course, is about more than its parts—but “Song Exploder,” which is in its sixth year and has recently been adapted into a Netflix series, is warm, deep, and illuminating. The show is rooted in Hirway’s expansive curiosity about how, exactly, art is made. After a while, his central question—“How did you get from nothing to this?”—begins to feel applicable to nearly every endeavor we undertake.
At the start of each episode, Hirway delivers a brief introduction in a soft, steady voice, and then mostly disappears. The choice to edit his own questions out of the show feels egoless—especially in the podcast business, which seems to reward a kind of unabashed garrulousness—and it lends his interviews a rambling, barstool intimacy. The episodes are short, often between fifteen and twenty minutes, and end with Hirway playing the deconstructed song in its entirety. (For much of 2019, “Song Exploder” was hosted by the musician and songwriter Thao Nguyen, who followed a similar format.) Though Hirway started out interviewing primarily independent or independent-leaning musicians (the first year featured the Postal Service, the Microphones, Spoon, and Julia Holter, among others), his purview has expanded to include more mainstream acts, including U2, Lorde, Ghostface Killah, Iggy Pop, the Roots, Björk, Norah Jones, Nine Inch Nails, and the Killers.
One of the more visceral pleasures of “Song Exploder” is how it makes plain certain enigmas of music production. Hirway wrangles control of an artist’s digital recording files—often called “stems”—and some of the best episodes reveal the earthly source of every single piece of audio on a record. One entry takes on “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” a 1995 single by the Queens-based Mobb Deep. The rapper Prodigy, who made up half of the duo, died in 2017, but the remaining member, Havoc, walks Hirway through how he constructed the song in his bedroom, in the Queensbridge projects, using records borrowed from his father and equipment purchased by Prodigy’s grandmother. Havoc extracted the song’s beat by pitch-shifting two seconds of a scratched copy of Herbie Hancock’s “Jessica,” created the bass line by manipulating a single piano note, and took the track’s signal sound—a bright, rising, atonal wail that appears before the chorus—from an old Quincy Jones record. For an interested listener, the episode can feel like briefly putting on a pair of X-ray specs.
Though Hirway has a technician’s ear, he is just as deft at distilling the animating impulse behind a piece of music. His goal isn’t merely to demystify production; he wants to study the idea or feeling that carried an artist through a song’s creation. One of my favorite episodes is from 2017, when Hirway interviewed the drummer Lars Ulrich and the singer and guitarist James Hetfield, both of the metal band Metallica, about “Moth Into Flame,” a cut from the group’s tenth LP, “Hardwired . . . to Self-Destruct.” For slightly younger artists, the process of songwriting is often a frantic journey of self-discovery. But Metallica, which formed in 1981, has been doing this work for a long time. In recent years, the band has developed a clear and consistent schedule: drop the kids off at school, and clock in to HQ before 9 A.M. Perhaps because of this—the band’s professionalism gently deflates the idea of art-making as dramatic—I found the episode gripping. “Moth Into Flame” is an unruly and vertiginous song; it can make a listener feel as if she were going slightly too fast on a highway off-ramp. After Hetfield developed the riff during a sound check, Ulrich took it home and began to think about an arrangement. He wanted the drums to sound especially big, in homage to the metal band Mastodon. “I’m letting you in on a lot of trade secrets here,” Ulrich says, laughing. “I’ve never really talked about this stuff in this detail.” Hetfield describes the lyrics as a response to the intoxication of fame and the brutality of life on the road. For him, songwriting is work, but it is also a deliberate and necessary process, and has been for forty years. “This saves my life daily,” he says. “This is therapy for me. We’re writing these songs because we need them.”
The therapeutic impulse is something of a motif in the series. For many artists, writing music is a way of seeing, understanding, and metabolizing their innermost desires. “I’ve always known what I’m interested in and what I’m feeling because of the way my music sounds,” the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers says, in an episode focussed on her song “Alaska.” In the current season, the pop star Selena Gomez speaks about how her single “Lose You to Love Me” was an attempt to exorcise her heartbreak after a wildly publicized split from Justin Bieber. “Honestly, I’m exhausted, but I just want to tell the truth. I want to let go of this feeling that I had,” Gomez said.
Hirway is considerably more visible on the Netflix adaptation than he is on the podcast, but the lightness of his touch—he is precise, informed, and gentle—seems to invite these sorts of confession. The television show unpacks four songs: Alicia Keys’s “Three Hour Drive,” R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Wait for It,” and “LA,” by the R. & B. singer Ty Dolla $ign, who was born Tyrone Griffin, Jr., in 1982. “This is intense,” Griffin says at the start of his episode, taking a seat across from Hirway. Griffin’s début album, “Free TC,” was released in 2015; he named the record after his brother, who is serving a sentence of sixty-seven years to life for first-degree murder, and who Griffin believes was unjustly incarcerated. “LA,” which opens the album, is glossy but mournful, and TC’s voice appears toward the end of the song. The track also features guest performances by Kendrick Lamar, Brandy, and James Fauntleroy, and prominent use of a talk box, a device that allows a musician to “talk” through her instrument, by singing or speaking into a plastic tube. (“One of the greatest instruments ever created,” Griffin declares.) Griffin nervously smokes a cigarette, and listening to him explain each element of the song—the bass, which was inspired by his father’s funk band, Lakeside; the sparsely deployed strings, which were arranged and conducted by Benjamin Wright, the former musical director for Aretha Franklin—is revelatory. “Songs to me are all about space, different explosions at different times,” he says.
In the episode about “Wait for It,” from the musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda clarifies his process by walking Hirway around the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood. The house was built in 1765, for the British colonel Roger Morris and his wife, Mary, but was later commandeered by George Washington; in 1810, Stephen Jumel, a French wine merchant, moved in with his wife, Eliza. After Jumel died, in 1832, Eliza married Aaron Burr. “Wait for It” is written from Burr’s woeful point of view, and it laments Alexander Hamilton’s swift success in politics. (“I’m not standing still, I am lying in wait,” Burr seethes.) When Miranda was working on the song, he would visit the mansion, loiter in Burr’s bedroom, and write.
Yet inspiration does not always arrive when we are ready to receive it. Miranda figured out the chorus to “Wait for It” not at Burr’s mansion but while walking to a party in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I was listening to the loop, and recording an a-cappella voice memo at the same time,” he recalls. Hirway asks Miranda if he still has the voice memo. We watch Miranda’s face as he plays it back. The recording is crude, hurried, and breathless. As he listens, Miranda appears embarrassed, proud, and, briefly, bewildered. The memo works as a reminder that songs are built by experts, but still, to some small and ineffable extent, divined. ♦
