Podcast · Music

Song Exploder

by Hrishikesh Hirway · English · Music

Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode features an artist discussing a song of theirs, breaking down the sounds and ideas that went into the writing and recording. Hosted and produced by Hrishikesh Hir

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 25 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 27 minNew

Elvis Costello - Alison

Elvis Costello is a singer and songwriter whose career spans five decades and over 30 albums. He’s a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriter Hall of Fame. He’s won Grammy Awards, Ivor Novello Awards, a BAFTA, and he’s on Rolling Stone’s list of the greatest songwriters of all time. He put out his first album, My Aim Is True, in 1977. This month, he released a 49th anniversary edition of the album. So for this episode, I spoke to Elvis Costello about the making of “Alison,” from that debut album. Coming up, you’ll hear the isolated tracks from the original recording, as…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E321 · 23 Sep 2026 · 26 min

Olivia Rodrigo - The Cure

Olivia Rodrigo is a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter. In June 2026, she released her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. The day it came out, it broke streaming records on Spotify and Amazon Music, and it debuted at number one on the Billboard Charts. I talked to Olivia Rodrigo here in my studio, and I also visited her long-time producer and co-writer Dan Nigro at his studio. Dan Nigro won the Grammy for Producer of the Year in 2025, in part for his work with Olivia Rodrigo. For this episode, the two of them told me the story of making Olivia’s song “The Cure,” from…
16 Sep 2026 · 25 min

Natalie Merchant - Sister Tilly

Donate to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library here: https://donate.imaginationlibrary.com/ Donate to Women's Media Center, co-founded by Gloria Steinem, here: https://act.womensmediacenter.com/a/support-wmc - When I heard the news of Dolly Parton’s death, and then a few days later, of Gloria Steinem’s death, I thought about this song that Natalie Merchant wrote called "Sister Tilly." It’s about losing a generation of activist women who did so much in their lifetimes. And so I wanted to go back and revisit Natalie Merchant’s song, and her beautiful story about what it means to her. This…
E320 · 9 Sep 2026 · 29 min

Paula Cole - I Don't Want to Wait

Paula Cole is a singer, songwriter and producer from Massachusetts. She put out her first solo album, Harbinger, in 1994. Her second album, This Fire, came out in 1996 and was a real breakthrough; she was nominated for seven Grammys, and she won the Grammy for Best New Artist. In fact, that year she was the first woman in Grammy history to be nominated for Producer of the Year without a male collaborator. For this episode, Paula told me about how she made one of the big hits from that album: “I Don’t Want to Wait.” It spent 56 weeks on the Billboard charts. And then, it was heard by millions…
E319 · 19 Aug 2026 · 23 min

Charli XCX - Camera

Charli XCX is a Grammy-winning artist who has been making music since she was a teenager. In July 2026, she released her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film. It debuted at number 1 on the UK charts—her 4th album in a row to hit number 1 there. In addition to her music career, for the last few years, she’s been acting in films. And for this episode, we talked about how those experiences inspired her song “Camera," and how she and producer Finn Keane figured out how to translate that into music. For more info, visit songexploder.net/charli-xcx .
E83 · 5 Aug 2026 · 15 min

Mitski - Your Best American Girl

In 2016, Mitski did an episode of Song Exploder about her song “Your Best American Girl.” She had just released her second album, Puberty 2. Later, Pitchfork named “Your Best American Girl” one of the top 10 best songs of the past decade, and Billboard named it as one of the songs that defined the decade. And in honor of the 10th anniversary of the album, there’s a new deluxe version that’s out digitally, and a limited edition vinyl is coming in October. I thought this would be a good time to revisit Mitski’s episode, where she and her collaborator Patrick Hyland break down how “Your Best…
E318 · 22 Jul 2026 · 23 min

Suki Waterhouse - Back in Love

Suki Waterhouse is a singer-songwriter, actress, and model from London. She released her first single in 2016, and her first album, I Can’t Let Go, in 2022, on Sub Pop. You might have seen her in the show Daisy Jones & The Six, which came out in 2023. Since then, she’s also had her first child, with her partner Robert Pattinson. And all of that history figured into her new album, Loveland. For this episode, Suki told me about how she made the song “Back in Love” with her longtime collaborators, producer Jules Apollinaire and songwriter Natalie Findlay. "Back in Love" was the first single…
E15 · 15 Jul 2026 · 26 min

Key Change: Questlove on Prince

My guest today is Ahmir Thompson, aka Questlove, the drummer and founding member of The Roots, as well as an author, a DJ, and an Oscar-winning film director. A song that changed my life is “Double Trouble” by The Roots, and the liner notes that Questlove wrote to go with the song. There’s a change in the drum sound in that song that blew my mind, and Questlove wrote a little bit about the effort that went into getting that drum sound. And as a drummer myself, I wanted to know everything about that. And that moment 26 years ago was maybe when the first seed for Song Exploder got planted in…
E317 · 8 Jul 2026 · 23 min

Metric - Victim of Luck

Metric is a band from Canada that was formed in 1998. They’ve won four Juno Awards, including Group of the Year. Rolling Stone included them in their list of the 50 Greatest Canadian Artists of All Time. In April 2026, Metric released their 10th album, Romanticize the Dive. And for this episode, I spoke to Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw about how they made the opening song on that album, “Victim of Luck.” For more info, visit songexploder.net/metric.
E316 · 24 Jun 2026 · 27 min

Hayley Kiyoko - Girls Like Girls

Hayley Kiyoko is a singer, songwriter, author, and director from Los Angeles. She was a child actor on Disney and Nickelodeon, and briefly in a girl group called The Stunners. But then, she started her career as a solo artist. In 2015, she put out the EP This Side of Paradise, and one of the songs on it was “Girls Like Girls.” She co-wrote it with Lily May-Young and Owen Thomas, and it was produced by James Flannigan. Hayley co-directed the music video for it, and when the song and the video came out, it was an absolute phenomenon. It became a lesbian anthem; Rolling Stone named it one of…
E14 · 17 Jun 2026 · 20 min

Key Change: Tatiana Maslany on "Faceshopping" by Sophie

My guest today is the actor Tatiana Maslany. One of the things I find so compelling about Tatiana and her career is that the roles that she plays often contain multitudes—literally. She played over 10 different characters–clones, but with distinct personalities–in the TV show Orphan Black. And in the Marvel Universe, she played She-Hulk, who also had the very different alter ego of Jennifer Walters, a lawyer. And right now, she’s starring in the show Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed on AppleTV. When Tatiana prepares for her roles—and the roles within the roles—she often uses music to inspire and…
E315 · 10 Jun 2026 · 24 min

Paul McCartney - Ripples in a Pond

Paul McCartney is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer whose career spans more than six decades. As a member of The Beatles and later Wings and then with his own solo albums, he’s simply one of the most influential artists of all time. He has more accolades than I have time to list in this intro. But if you’re listening to this, you already know all that. In May 2026, he released his twentieth solo album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane. He co-produced it with Andrew Watt, who won the 2021 Grammy for Producer of the Year, and whose credits include working with Lady Gaga, The…
E314 · 20 May 2026 · 26 min

Hot Chip - Boy From School

Hot Chip is a band from London made up of Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin. Their second album, The Warning, came out in 2006. It was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and named one of the best albums of the year by NME and Pitchfork. And later, NME would include it in their list of best albums of all time. For this episode, I talked to them about one of the songs from The Warning called “Boy From School.” You might have heard it in the second season of the show Beef on Netflix—the band’s also in the show—or you might have heard it on The Simpsons. You could…
13 May 2026 · 23 min

Key Change: Emma Straub on ‘69 Love Songs’ by The Magnetic Fields

My guest today is the bestselling author Emma Straub. Her books include 'This Time Tomorrow,' 'Modern Lovers,' 'The Vacationers,' and more. And with her husband, Michael Fusco, she co-owns the beautiful Brooklyn bookstore Books Are Magic. I'm so thrilled to have her on because, not only is she a wonderful writer, but Key Change is a series about music fandom and identity. And Emma's newest novel 'American Fantasy' is also about music fandom and identity. That story is set on a cruise ship centered around a nineties boy band and their fans. But today, Emma's going to tell me her story about…
E313 · 6 May 2026 · 26 min

The xx - Crystalised

The xx formed in 2005, when they were still in high school. They signed to the UK label Young, and put out their first album in 2009. It won the prestigious Mercury Prize, and was named one of the best albums of the year by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and more. Since then, the Guardian has named it one of the best albums of the 21st century. This year, the three band members, Romy Croft, Oliver Sim, and Jamie xx played together as The xx for the first time in 8 years. I spoke to them in between the weekends at Coachella, where they were opening their sets with the song “Crystalised.” It’s the…
E200 · 22 Apr 2026 · 19 min

Yusuf / Cat Stevens - Father and Son

The legendary singer/songwriter Yusuf / Cat Stevens released his first album in 1967. He’s a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and his albums have sold millions. In 2020, he released Tea for the Tillerman², a re-imagining of his hit 1970 album Tea for the Tillerman. In the song “Father & Son,” he sings a duet between the two title characters, doing both voices. But in the 2020 version, he approached this song in a kind of astonishing way—he recorded the part of the father, but for the part of the son, he used a live recording of himself from 1970, taken from a show he played at The…
15 Apr 2026 · 25 min

The Memory Palace: The Thundering Herd, The Vanishing American

Today, we're sharing an episode of Nate DiMeo's wonderful podcast, The Memory Palace, which helped inspire both Song Exploder, and a song on my upcoming album. So today, I want to present a kind of two-part story. The first part: "The Thundering Herd, The Vanishing American," from The Memory Palace. And in the second half of the episode, I’ll tell you how it ended up unexpectedly unlocking a song that I’d been trying to figure out. For more episodes of The Memory Palace, visit thememorypalace.us. To pre-order my album visit keeledscales.com. To get tickets to one of my shows on tour, visit…
E312 · 8 Apr 2026 · 23 min

Hurray for the Riff Raff - Alibi

Alynda Segarra is a singer songwriter from the Bronx. They formed Hurray for the Riff Raff in 2007, and since then, they’ve released 8 albums. Their most recent is The Past Is Still Alive, which came out in 2024. It was named one of the best albums of the year in the New York Times, the Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, and The Atlantic, and Pitchfork called it one of the best albums of the decade so far. For this episode, I spoke to Alynda about the first track on the album, “Alibi.” For more info, visit songexploder.net/hurray-for-the-riff-raff.
E311 · 25 Mar 2026 · 26 min

Jack Harlow - Say Hello

Jack Harlow is from Louisville, Kentucky, and started performing and releasing music in 2015, when he was in high school. In 2020, he released his first album, which went double platinum. He was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Performance. He’s had multiple number one hits across his first three albums. For his fourth album, Monica, which just came out in March 2026, he switched things up dramatically. I was curious how and why—how did someone who had so much success as a rapper approach a new way of making music? So for this episode, I spoke to Jack Harlow about the song “Say Hello,”…
E12 · 18 Mar 2026 · 22 min

Key Change: Baz Luhrmann on "Time After Time"

My guest today is Baz Luhrmann, the award-winning director whose films include Moulin Rouge!, Strictly Ballroom, The Great Gatsby, Elvis, and Romeo + Juliet. His newest film is EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a critically acclaimed documentary about Elvis that’s playing right now in theaters and in IMAX. Before becoming a massively successful film director, Baz began his showbiz career as an actor, and as a ballroom dancer, in Australia. His first film was Strictly Ballroom, which came out in 1992, and became one of the highest-grossing Australian films of all time. It was originally a play,…
E310 · 11 Mar 2026 · 24 min

Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now

Thompson Twins originally formed in 1977 in Sheffield, in the UK. “Hold Me Now,” their iconic hit, came out as a single in November 1983, and eventually on their 1984 album, Into the Gap. That album went to number 1 in the UK and went platinum in the US. The song spent 21 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. So for this episode, I talked to the founding member of Thompson Twins, Tom Bailey, and he told me how he and his bandmates, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway, made “Hold Me Now.” For more info, visit songexploder.net/thompson-twins.
E309 · 25 Feb 2026 · 26 min

Silvana Estrada - Como Un Pájaro

Silvana Estrada is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Veracruz, Mexico. She won the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist in 2022, and she’s been nominated for three others, including for her song “Como Un Pájaro,” which is the song that we talked about for this episode. It’s from her second album, which came out in 2025, but she started writing the song several years before that. So we talked about all the different versions of this song, and a couple of versions of Silvana herself, that emerged throughout the process. For more info, visit songexploder.net/silvana-estrada.
E243 · 18 Feb 2026 · 29 min

Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth

This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron & Wine in the fall of 2022 about the song "Flightless Bird, American Mouth." And there are a couple of reasons. One, there’s a new Iron & Wine album that’s coming out this month, called Hen’s Teeth. And secondly, I actually have a song of my own that’s coming out today, the same day as this episode, and it features Iron & Wine on the track. It’s called “Stray Dogs,” and it’s the first song from an album that I’m releasing in April, called In The Last Hour of Light. And this Iron & Wine episode of the podcast is what…
E308 · 11 Feb 2026 · 25 min

The Marías - No One Noticed

The Marías is a band from Los Angeles, made up of María Zardoya, Josh Conway, Jesse Perlman, and Edward James. They released their first EPs in 2017 and 2018, and their first album in 2021. But then, as you’ll hear, there was a period of a lot of uncertainty around the band’s future. Eventually, their second album, Submarine, came out in 2024, and it was incredibly successful. Stereogum called it one of the best albums of the year, and the band was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. But all of that almost didn’t happen. I talked to María about the making of their hit song “No One…
E307 · 28 Jan 2026 · 25 min

Leon Thomas - Mutt

Leon Thomas is a singer, songwriter, producer, and actor. He’s nominated for six Grammys at this year’s Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist, Best R&B Album, and Album of the Year for Mutt. Mutt is his second album, and I talked to Leon about the title track, which was a breakout hit. He’d already won a Grammy for his work with SZA, but he reached a new level in his own career with this song and this album. I also spoke to David Phelps and Rob Gueringer, AKA D. Phelps and Freaky Rob, who produced the song. For more info, visit songexploder.net/leon-thomas.
E11 · 21 Jan 2026 · 26 min

Key Change: John Green on "You'll Never Walk Alone"

My guest today is John Green. John is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including 'Looking for Alaska,' 'The Fault in Our Stars,' 'Turtles All the Way Down,' 'The Anthropocene Reviewed,' and 'Everything is Tuberculosis.' John and his brother Hank Green have co-created a lot of projects together, including their massive YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, and their podcast, 'Dear Hank and John.' He also serves on the Board of Trustees for global health nonprofit Partners in Health. And when I asked John if there was a piece of music that changed his life, he knew the answer right…
E306 · 14 Jan 2026 · 22 min

Hit-Boy and Nipsey Hussle - Racks In the Middle (feat. Roddy Ricch and Hit-Boy)

Hit-Boy is an award-winning producer and rapper from LA. He’s one of my all-time favorite producers, from “Backseat Freestyle” by Kendrick Lamar, to “Sicko Mode” by Travis Scott, to tracks he’s made for Beyonce, Nas, and the Jay-Z & Kanye album Watch the Throne. So I was really excited to talk to him, and when I asked him which song from his incredible catalog he wanted to talk about, I was really moved by his choice. He picked “Racks in the Middle” by Nipsey Hussle, featuring Roddy Ricch. Nipsey Hussle was a rapper and community activist from LA whose career was cut short, tragically, when…
E305 · 17 Dec 2025 · 25 min

Air - Playground Love (feat. Gordon Tracks)

The band Air is a duo from Versailles, France. Their first EP came out in 1995, followed by their critically acclaimed debut album, ‘Moon Safari,' which was an international hit. Then they made the music for the film ‘The Virgin Suicides,‘ which was written and directed by Oscar-winner Sofia Coppola, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. The movie came out in 1999, and it was Sofia Coppola’s first film. An album version of Air’s score came out in 2000, and it was nominated for a Brit award. Pitchfork put it at number four on their list of the best film scores of all time. In addition to…
E10 · 10 Dec 2025 · 23 min

Key Change: Rian Johnson on Wagner's 'Das Rheingold'

My guest today is director Rian Johnson, which is exciting for me, because I’ve been a huge fan of his ever since seeing his first feature film, ‘Brick,' in 2006. Since then, he’s made six more feature films, including ‘Looper‘ in 2012; ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘ in 2017; the murder mystery ‘Knives Out‘ in 2019; and his most recent movie, another in the 'Knives Out' series, ‘Wake Up Dead Man,‘ which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to ‘Das Rheingold‘ by Richard…
E304 · 3 Dec 2025 · 23 min

Jessie Reyez - Goliath

Jessie Reyez is a singer and songwriter originally from Toronto. She's won two of Canada's Juno awards, and she's been nominated for a Grammy. In addition to writing her own music, Jessie's been a songwriter on tracks by Calvin Harris, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Eminem, and many others. You're probably aware that there are songwriters and producers whose names you'll find over and over again in the credits for big hits; Jessie is one of them. But for this episode, I talked to her about her own song "Goliath." And the day that she wrote that song, she happened to be in the studio with a bunch of…

About Song Exploder

Song Exploder is a English music podcast from Hrishikesh Hirway. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Hrishikesh Hirway
Language: English
Category: Music
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 25 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id788236947

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