72 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
PODCAST DEPT.
WHAT’S THAT NOISE?
The revelations of “Song Exploder.”
BY AMANDAPETRUSICH
ILLUSTRATION BY NICK LITTLE
F
or much of the first half of the twen-
tieth century, it was possible for
a curious listener to identify each of
the constituent parts of a pop song. A
hit such as Frank Sinatra’s “Young at
Heart,” which sold more than a mil-
lion copies in 1953, featured recogniz-
able analog components: strings, horns,
flute, brushes on a snare drum, Sina-
tra’s seductive, lilting vocal. Yet by 1955
the advent of multitrack recording, in
which the various parts of a song could
be captured separately and then braided
together, meant that a recording was
no longer merely the document of a
live, synchronous performance. Auteur-
ist producers such as Brian Wilson and
Phil Spector came to think of sound
as pliable—any piece of audio could
be denatured and reconstructed. The
old way, in which a finite number of
fallible people played in a room until
they got it right, had been obliterated.
In the past few decades, that sense
of pliability has only ballooned. Tech-
nology has evolved so fast and so force-
fully that the notion of going into a
studio—a room in which trained pro-
fessionals, seated behind a panel of
glass, turn knobs and adjust levers—
feels nearly quaint. Records can be made
at home, using software such as Able-
ton Live or GarageBand, which can
then be augmented with any number
of plug-ins, expanding the palette of
available sounds. Many of these pro-
duction techniques were first adopted
by hip-hop or electronic artists, but
they are now ubiquitous; this means
that trying to determine the origin of
any single sound on a modern record-
ing is difficult. Instrumentation, in the
most general sense of the word, has
become opaque. For fans who favor
streaming services, the absence of liner
notes, which once offered detailed pro-
duction and songwriting credits, only
exaggerates the mystery. Is that an ac-
tual violin, a synthesizer that sounds
like a violin, a sample of a synthesizer
that sounds like a violin, or a raccoon
playing a kazoo that has been digitally
manipulated to sound like a violin?
In 2014, the electronic musician
Hrishikesh Hirway launched a biweekly
podcast, “Song Exploder,” that works
as a tonic for such confusion. Each ep-
isode sees a guest artist dissect a song
he or she has written, recorded, or pro-
duced, considering the provenance and
punch of its individual components.
The premise might sound vaguely clin-
ical, or even joyless—music, of course,
is about more than its parts—but “Song
Exploder,” which is in its sixth year and
has recently been adapted into a Netflix
series, is warm, deep, and illuminating.
The show is rooted in Hirway’s expan-
sive curiosity about how, exactly, art is
made. After a while, his central ques-
tion—“How did you get from nothing
to this?”—begins to feel applicable to
nearly every endeavor we undertake.
At the start of each episode, Hirway
delivers a brief introduction in a soft,
steady voice, and then mostly disap-
pears. The choice to edit his own ques-
tions out of the show feels egoless—
especially in the podcast business, which
seems to reward a kind of unabashed
garrulousness—and it lends his inter-
views a rambling, barstool intimacy.
The episodes are short, often between
fifteen and twenty minutes, and end
with Hirway playing the deconstructed
song in its entirety. (For much of 2019,
“Song Exploder” was hosted by the mu-
sician and songwriter Thao Nguyen,
who followed a similar format.) Though
Hirway started out interviewing pri-
marily independent or independent-
leaning musicians (the first year fea-
At its best, the show reveals the origin of nearly every sound in a given song. tured the Postal Service, the Microphones,
