Song Exploder

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...

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 produc...

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 Walter...

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 relea...

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...

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 nove...

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,...

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 vers...

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...

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...

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 dra...

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 a...

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...

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 abo...

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 featur...

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...

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 s...

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 an...

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 r...

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 fi...

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,‘ whi...

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 cred...

My guest today is Demi Adejuyigbe. One of the things that makes Demi so special is how hard it is to summarize him in an intro like this, because he has so many talents and applies them in so many different ways. He is a standup comedian, with a brand new one-hour special out on Dropout TV. He co-hosted the podcasts Gilmore Guys and Punch Up the Jam. He’s a screenwriter, who wrote on TV shows like...

Clipse was formed in 1994 by two brothers: Gene Thornton Jr, aka Malice, and his younger brother Terrence Thornton, aka Pusha T. From the beginning, they’ve worked with producer Pharrell Williams, originally as part of the acclaimed production duo, The Neptunes. But then, there was a 16 year gap between the third Clipse album, which came out in 2009, and their most recent album, Let God Sort Em Ou...

On September 5, 1973, the first and only Buckingham Nicks album was released. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it was how the world was first introduced to the music of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, before they went on to become members of Fleetwood Mac. Their time together in Fleetwood Mac led to some of the best-selling, most critically acclaimed, and most influential albums of all time. Their i...