Rishikesh Hirway

But meanwhile, the rest of my life is moving much faster than that.

so I kind of felt like I needed to take a break.

Every time I would try writing songs at that point, I felt like nothing could live up to those expectations, you know, and I wouldn't even let a song breathe, you know, like I would play a G on a guitar and I'd be like, derivative, you know, I like, I couldn't even get started.

So I was feeling kind of stuck and trying to figure out what I was going to do.

And I think in the meantime, I was

exploring like what other ideas do I have if I'm not putting my foot on the gas as hard as I can just on music and just on this project, what else might I be open to?

And so in those next couple of years, I did a whole bunch of different things.

I scored a couple of movies.

That was my first chance scoring films.

I started another band called Moors with Lakeith Stanfield, where I didn't have to write lyrics because that was the biggest part of the pressure for me.

I was just making the beats.

I loved working with him.

And so I would just, you know, pass him instrumentals and he'd write to them.

And then that was a really fun project.

And one of the other projects was this idea for a podcast where I could interview somebody and using their stems, get the inside story.

What was their perspective on making the song?

And while they tell that story, people could hear all of these parts that led to the final thing.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Hirway.

When I first reached out to Phil, it was because I was a fan of his work.