THE INSPIRATION SERIES / BY ROB URBAN
Hrishikesh
Hirway.
There is more
in the song.
A musician’s curiosity. An editor’s patience. The pleasure of hearing something you had missed.
On Song Exploder, a familiar recording can suddenly contain something you have never noticed.
A guitar part steps forward. A musician explains why it is there. Then the parts come back together, and the song has a little more room inside it.
Hrishikesh Hirway built a show around that pleasure. He is a musician himself, and his curiosity reaches into the decisions that make a recording particular: an experiment, a sound someone nearly discarded, a contribution that changed what everyone else played.
I admire the care in that attention. He treats the work as worth understanding and the listener as capable of understanding it. There is no entrance exam. You can arrive because you love a song, and leave with another reason to love it.
THE IMPULSE BEHIND THE SHOW
He wanted you
to hear it, too.
In a conversation with Chris Duffy for TED, Hirway explained the impulse behind the show. Making his own music gave him access to individual parts, and to the experiences behind them, that an audience would only encounter as a finished recording. He wanted to bring listeners closer to those things.
That is a wonderfully specific creative problem. The person who made something knows where the choices are buried. The person receiving it may feel the result without knowing what produced it. Hirway found a form that could bring the two a little closer.
His own work includes albums as The One AM Radio, composition, and other podcasts. I think that experience matters to the portrait. He comes to the conversation with a maker’s interest in the details and a listener’s desire to be surprised.
There is affection in wanting another person to hear the part you cannot stop thinking about.
The question can leave.
The care remains.
The show’s account of its method describes Hirway working with isolated recording tracks, asking artists about particular decisions, and removing his side of the interview in the edit. His introductions and transitions remain, but the artist carries the central account.
That choice gives the conversation an unusual intimacy. A question has done its work and can leave. What remains is the answer, placed beside the sound that helps us understand it.
Questions influence which memories an artist returns to. Editing determines which memory appears first, which explanation needs an example and where the full recording can finally carry what language cannot. Silence, narration and a separated instrument are arranged with the same concern for sequence that a musician brings to a track list.
As a writer, I find this especially admirable. There is satisfaction in a well-formed question, and it can be hard to let one go. Hirway is willing to judge the finished piece by what helps the listener. His presence is in the care of the arrangement.
FLEETWOOD MAC / GO YOUR OWN WAY
Two guitars.
One new way
to hear them.
In the Fleetwood Mac episode, Lindsey Buckingham explains how different guitar sounds combine in Go Your Own Way. The transcript marks the sequence: a rougher guitar sound, a cleaner one, then the two together.
The explanation comes with a comparison the listener can make.
Buckingham describes wanting the separate guitars to merge into a single, richer sound. The edit lets the distinction remain clear long enough to understand that intention. Once the parts rejoin, the listener has a reason to notice their combination.
A technical term by itself can leave a listener nodding without understanding. Separating the parts creates a shared reference. Someone who has never mixed a recording can still compare the examples and carry that difference into the finished song.
The recording does some of the explaining.
R.E.M. / TRY NOT TO BREATHE
The song changes
when someone joins in.
The R.E.M. episode about Try Not to Breathe works differently because Michael Stipe and Mike Mills describe different parts of its creation. The transcript moves from Mills’s account of Peter Buck experimenting with a dulcimer into Stipe’s description of the musical associations it suggested.
Later, Mills explains how percussion decisions could change after Stipe added his voice. The vocal becomes part of the information other musicians respond to, rather than a final layer placed on an already settled arrangement.
Those accounts give the episode movement without needing the interviewer to announce every turn. One person identifies a choice; another adds what it made possible. The listener can follow a collaboration through the changing demands of the recording.
I love the respect this gives collaboration. One musician’s contribution becomes something another person can respond to. A recording accumulates decisions, and an attentive edit can help us recognize whose imagination moved it forward.
A good question can remain useful after its wording has been cut.
A recognizable
show. A growing
circle of people.
The format makes room for more than the featured artist. The show’s current credits name Carlos Lerma for illustration and Kathleen Smith for music clearance, alongside Hirway’s hosting and production. Song Exploder is an independent member of Radiotopia from PRX.
Its history also includes a handoff. At the end of the December 2018 Fleetwood Mac episode, Hirway announced that Thao Nguyen would host in the coming year and Christian Koons would take over production while he remained creative director. He described Koons’s progression from production assistant through increasing responsibility on the show.
That is a detail worth keeping in view. A distinctive creative project can also be a place where other people grow. The identity of the work becomes strong enough to welcome someone else’s judgment.
I admire that confidence. It leaves room to credit the people who help make something possible, even when the finished experience feels as intimate as one person speaking into your ear.
The next time
the song comes on.
An episode can change the scale at which a listener pays attention. A background part that once passed unnoticed now has a reason for being there. A transition becomes a decision somebody had to solve.
Hirway’s format gives that attention a place to develop. There is room to hear an isolated part, attach an explanation to it and then return it to the whole. The pleasure of the song does not require forgetting how it was made.
That is why Hirway matters to me. He gives people a way to look more closely at work they already enjoy. Explanation can deepen affection. Paying attention to a small part can make the whole feel more alive.
He also offers a fine example of creative confidence. A person can make something unmistakably their own while directing the attention toward someone else. Taste, patience and the ability to listen become a signature.
For a first episode, a familiar recording is a useful starting point. Recognition gives you something to test the explanation against. Follow one instrument or vocal detail through the account, then notice where it sits when the complete song plays.
The subject is a musician’s work, but the episode also reveals an editor’s patience: deciding when an explanation has done enough and when the listener needs to hear the sound.
The question has disappeared. The thing it taught you to notice can remain.
About the work
Who is Hrishikesh Hirway?
Hrishikesh Hirway is a musician, composer and podcast creator. He created Song Exploder, which explores how musicians make particular songs, and has released music as The One AM Radio and under his own name.
How does Song Exploder work?
Hirway interviews artists using isolated tracks from a recording, then edits their explanations alongside the music. He removes his side of the central interview so the artist’s account carries the story.
Which episodes are discussed in this profile?
This profile looks at Lindsey Buckingham discussing Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way, and Michael Stipe and Mike Mills discussing R.E.M.’s Try Not to Breathe. Both episodes have transcripts on the Song Exploder website.
FOLLOW THE SOUND
Sources and further listening: Song Exploder’s method and credits, the Fleetwood Mac episode and R.E.M. episode with their linked transcripts, Hirway’s TED biography, and his conversation with Chris Duffy.
Keep noticing.
I’m Rob Urban. I’m interested in the craft of making something worth paying attention to. For more of my thinking, or a conversation about writing or consulting, meet me here.