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Spoon, and Julia Holter, among oth-
ers), his purview has expanded to in-
clude more mainstream acts, including
U2, Lorde, Ghostface Killah, Iggy Pop,
the Roots, Björk, Norah Jones, Nine
Inch Nails, and the Killers.
One of the more visceral pleasures
of “Song Exploder” is how it makes
plain certain enigmas of music produc-
tion. Hirway wrangles control of an art-
ist’s digital recording files—often called
“stems”—and some of the best episodes
reveal the earthly source of every sin-
gle piece of audio on a record. One entry
takes on “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” a 1995
single by the Queens-based Mobb Deep.
The rapper Prodigy, who made up half
of the duo, died in 2017, but the remain-
ing member, Havoc, walks Hirway
through how he constructed the song
in his bedroom, in the Queensbridge
projects, using records borrowed from
his father and equipment purchased by
Prodigy’s grandmother. Havoc extracted
the song’s beat by pitch-shifting two
seconds of a scratched copy of Herbie
Hancock’s “Jessica,” created the bass
line by manipulating a single piano note,
and took the track’s signal sound—a
bright, rising, atonal wail that appears
before the chorus—from an old Quincy
Jones record. For an interested listener,
the episode can feel like briefly putting
on a pair of X-ray specs.
T
hough Hirway has a technician’s
ear, he is just as deft at distilling
the animating impulse behind a piece
of music. His goal isn’t merely to demys-
tify production; he wants to study the
idea or feeling that carried an artist
through a song’s creation. One of my
favorite episodes is from 2017, when Hir-
way interviewed the drummer Lars Ul-
rich and the singer and guitarist James
Hetfield, both of the metal band Me-
tallica, about “Moth Into Flame,” a
cut from the group’s tenth LP, “Hard-
wired... to Self-Destruct.” For slightly
younger artists, the process of songwrit-
ing is often a frantic journey of self-dis-
covery. But Metallica, which formed in
1981, has been doing this work for a long
time. In recent years, the band has de-
veloped a clear and consistent schedule:
drop the kids off at school, and clock in
to HQ before 9 a.m. Perhaps because
of this—the band’s professionalism gen-
tly deflates the idea of art-making as
dramatic—I found the episode grip-
ping. “Moth Into Flame” is an unruly
and vertiginous song; it can make a lis-
tener feel as if she were going slightly
too fast on a highway off-ramp. After
Hetfield developed the riff during a
sound check, Ulrich took it home and
began to think about an arrangement.
He wanted the drums to sound espe-
cially big, in homage to the metal band
Mastodon. “I’m letting you in on a lot
of trade secrets here,” Ulrich says, laugh-
ing. “I’ve never really talked about this
stuff in this detail.” Hetfield describes
the lyrics as a response to the intoxica-
tion of fame and the brutality of life on
the road. For him, songwriting is work,
but it is also a deliberate and necessary
process, and has been for forty years.
“This saves my life daily,” he says. “This
is therapy for me. We’re writing these
songs because we need them.”
The therapeutic impulse is some-
thing of a motif in the series. For many
artists, writing music is a way of see-
ing, understanding, and metabolizing
their innermost desires. “I’ve always
known what I’m interested in and what
I’m feeling because of the way my music
sounds,” the singer and songwriter
Maggie Rogers says, in an episode fo-
cussed on her song “Alaska.” In the cur-
rent season, the pop star Selena Gomez
speaks about how her single “Lose You
to Love Me” was an attempt to exor-
cise her heartbreak after a wildly pub-
licized split from Justin Bieber. “Hon-
estly, I’m exhausted, but I just want to
tell the truth. I want to let go of this
feeling that I had,” Gomez said.
Hirway is considerably more visible
on the Netflix adaptation than he is on
the podcast, but the lightness of his
touch—he is precise, informed, and
gentle—seems to invite these sorts of
confession. The television show un-
packs four songs: Alicia Keys’s “Three
Hour Drive,” R.E.M.’s “Losing My
Religion,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Wait
for It,” and “LA,” by the R. & B. singer
Ty Dolla $ign, who was born Tyrone
Griffin, Jr., in 1982. “This is intense,”
Griffin says at the start of his episode,
taking a seat across from Hirway.
Griffin’s début album, “Free TC,” was
released in 2015; he named the record
after his brother, who is serving a sen-
tence of sixty-seven years to life for
first-degree murder, and who Griffinbelieves was unjustly incarcerated. “LA,”
which opens the album, is glossy but
mournful, and TC’s voice appears to-
ward the end of the song. The track
also features guest performances by
Kendrick Lamar, Brandy, and James
Fauntleroy, and prominent use of a talk
box, a device that allows a musician to
“talk” through her instrument, by sing-
ing or speaking into a plastic tube. (“One
of the greatest instruments ever cre-
ated,” Griffin declares.) Griffin ner-
vously smokes a cigarette, and listen-
ing to him explain each element of the
song—the bass, which was inspired by
his father’s funk band, Lakeside; the
sparsely deployed strings, which were
arranged and conducted by Benjamin
Wright, the former musical director for
Aretha Franklin—is revelatory. “Songs
to me are all about space, different ex-
plosions at different times,” he says.
In the episode about “Wait for It,”
from the musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Man-
uel Miranda clarifies his process by walk-
ing Hirway around the Morris-Jumel
Mansion in New York City’s Washing-
ton Heights neighborhood. The house
was built in 1765, for the British colo-
nel Roger Morris and his wife, Mary,
but was later commandeered by George
Washington; in 1810, Stephen Jumel, a
French wine merchant, moved in with
his wife, Eliza. After Jumel died, in 1832,
Eliza married Aaron Burr. “Wait for It”
is written from Burr’s woeful point of
view, and it laments Alexander Ham-
ilton’s swift success in politics. (“I’m not
standing still, I am lying in wait,” Burr
seethes.) When Miranda was working
on the song, he would visit the man-
sion, loiter in Burr’s bedroom, and write.
Yet inspiration does not always ar-
rive when we are ready to receive it.
Miranda figured out the chorus to
“Wait for It” not at Burr’s mansion but
while walking to a party in Williams-
burg, Brooklyn. “I was listening to the
loop, and recording an a-cappella voice
memo at the same time,” he recalls.
Hirway asks Miranda if he still has the
voice memo. We watch Miranda’s face
as he plays it back. The recording is
crude, hurried, and breathless. As he
listens, Miranda appears embarrassed,
proud, and, briefly, bewildered. The
memo works as a reminder that songs
are built by experts, but still, to some
small and ineffable extent, divined.