Song Exploder: The Best Of The Ultimate Music Production Podcast
The podcast “Song Exploder” walks listeners through a musician’s story of how they create a single song. We’ve accumulated some of its most engaging and insightful episodes.
Written by Minnah Zaheer
Images courtesy of Song Exploder
I spend countless hours listening to songs over and over again, analyzing individual elements and how they contribute to the piece as a whole. So when I discovered the podcast “Song Exploder,” I immediately fell in love.
Hrishikesh Hirway created the podcast, which is an independent production and a member of the nonprofit podcast conglomerate PRX, in 2014 and hosted it for four years before Thao Nguyen took over late last year. Each episode consists of about 10-15 minutes of an artist breaking down the process of creating a single song, providing commentary on production techniques both from a perspective of listening pleasure and from a perspective of personal connection.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a list of some of the best content the podcast has to offer. Give it a shot.
Mitski – “Your Best American Girl”
In the breakdown of her 2016 song “Your Best American Girl,” Mitski starts off by talking about how “lyrics and vocal melody are key” in every song she makes. Her isolated vocal track of the song’s chorus perfectly encompasses her desperation to fit into something she never will. She describes her lifelong struggle with being half Japanese and half white, and her inability to feel any sense of belonging to either side of her heritage.
Her long-time collaborator Patrick Hyland also contributes to the episode, detailing his approach to using vocals like an instrument of their own. Highland also reveals how he layered the music in a way that makes certain that listeners will feel the impact of Mitski’s bittersweet attitude towards her life.
St. Vincent – “New York”
St. Vincent’s episode of “Song Exploder” begins with a reiteration of its standard explicit content warning: “If you missed it earlier, just a heads up that this episode contains explicit language. A lot of explicit language.” Despite the soothing nature of St. Vincent’s bittersweet song “New York,” she explains her love for the word “motherf---er” and how fun it is for her to say.
She also discusses the heartache of losing David Bowie and Prince and the importance of recognizing heroes in your day-to-day life. The unique production techniques she and producer Jack Antonoff used in producing the song, including producing sound devices that function as “punctuation marks” and incorporating St. Vincent’s obsession with pedal steel guitar, allowed her to create the track she says is one of her favorite ones she’s ever made.
Perfume Genius – “Slip Away”
Mike Hadreas, whose stage name is Perfume Genius, starts off the episode discussing interesting production techniques, including using instruments that he’d never heard of before like a thumbtack piano, which has thumb tacks that hit the piano strings and create a harpsichord-like sound. He also used a microphone that looks like a human head and essentially functions like an omnidirectional microphone, creating the feeling of literally getting into the head of listeners, to truly encapsulate his appreciation for long-term love in the mood of his song “Slip Away.”
But towards the end, he opens up about the love he’s found in his long-term boyfriend Alan Wyffels, a classically-trained musician,and how being gay has grown from something shameful to one of his favorite things about himself. Hadreas’ exploration of his approach to the song perfectly combines the personal with the industrial, presenting “Slip Away” as an anthem for those in love (or looking for love) everywhere.