Song Exploder

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 dramatically. I was curious how and why—how did someone who had so much success as a rapper approach a new way of making music? So for this episode, I spoke to Jack Harlow about the song “Say Hello,” which is the closing track on Monica. For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/jack-harlow">songexploder.net/jack-harlow.</a>

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 actor, and as a ballroom dancer, in Australia. His first film was Strictly Ballroom, which came out in 1992, and became one of the highest-grossing Australian films of all time. It was originally a play, and there’s a song in the film that was part of the story all the way back when it was first performed on stage. And that’s what Baz and I talked about for this episode. For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/baz-luhrmann">songexploder.net/baz-luhrmann.</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 he told me how he and his bandmates, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway, made “Hold Me Now.” For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/thompson-twins">songexploder.net/thompson-twins.</a>

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 about all the different versions of this song, and a couple of versions of Silvana herself, that emerged throughout the process. For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/silvana-estrada">songexploder.net/silvana-estrada.</a>

This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron &amp; 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 &amp; 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 features Iron &amp; Wine on the track. It’s called “Stray Dogs,” and it’s the first song from an album that I’m releasing in April, called In The Last Hour of Light. And this Iron &amp; Wine episode of the podcast is what actually led to our collaboration on the song.  I’d been a huge fan of Iron &amp; Wine for two decades, and this live taping, which happened in Wimberly, Texas, at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, was the first time that I got to meet Sam Beam from Iron &amp; Wine So before we go back and listen to the episode itself, I thought it could be nice to talk to Sam about how this episode happened, and then how that led to the making of “Stray Dogs.”  For more, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/iron-and-wine">songexploder.net/iron-and-wine</a>.

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 one of the best albums of the year, and the band was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. But all of that almost didn’t happen. I talked to María about the making of their hit song “No One Noticed.” The story’s beginning, middle, and end all took place during different eras of the band’s existence. In the middle section, when maybe they weren’t going to even be a band anymore, María enlisted the help of Grammy-nominated producer Gianluca Buccellati. And I spoke to Luca for this episode, as well. For more, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/the-marias">songexploder.net/the-marias</a>.

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&amp;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 song and this album. I also spoke to David Phelps and Rob Gueringer, AKA D. Phelps and Freaky Rob, who produced the song.  For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/leon-thomas">songexploder.net/leon-thomas.</a>

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 and John.' He also serves on the Board of Trustees for global health nonprofit Partners in Health. And when I asked John if there was a piece of music that changed his life, he knew the answer right away: "You'll Never Walk Alone" by Gerry and the Pacemakers. For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/john-green">songexploder.net/john-green.</a>

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 &amp; 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 really moved by his choice. He picked “Racks in the Middle” by Nipsey Hussle, featuring Roddy Ricch. Nipsey Hussle was a rapper and community activist from LA whose career was cut short, tragically, when he was murdered in 2019. He’d released just one album, Victory Lap. “Racks in the Middle” was the last song released in Nipsey’s lifetime. It went platinum, and a year after his death, it won the Grammy for Best Rap Performance, in 2020. This episode features a few short clips from a video that Nipsey Hussle made for the website Genius, back in 2019. There’s a link to the full video that he made in the shownotes. But here in the studio, to tell the story, I spoke to Hit-Boy about how “Racks in the Middle” came together. To learn more, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/hit-boy">songexploder.net/hit-boy.</a>

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 credits for big hits; Jessie is one of them.  But for this episode, I talked to her about her own song "Goliath." And the day that she wrote that song, she happened to be in the studio with a bunch of other songwriters and producers. So I also talked to Jordan and Stefan Johnson, from the production team Monsters &amp; Strangerz, and Jeff Gitelman, AKA Gitty. Between the three of them, their credits also include songs by Selena Gomez, Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, Mac Miller, and again, tons more. When a group like this gets together to write music, they don't always know if they're going to be making a song that's going to get recorded and released by an artist somewhere down the line, or if the song's going to get recorded at all. But in the case of "Goliath," what came out was a song that was very personal to Jessie Reyez. For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/jessie-reyez">songexploder.net/jessie-reyez.</a>

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 <a href="https://www.dropout.tv/">Dropout TV. </a>He co-hosted the podcasts <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gilmore-guys/id923957904">Gilmore Guys </a>and <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/punch-up-the-jam/id1325197667">Punch Up the Jam.</a> He’s a screenwriter, who wrote on TV shows like The Good Place. He’s famous on the internet for his parody songs, spoofing artists like Will Smith and Lana Del Rey; and for his September videos, where, for years, he made increasingly elaborate videos of himself, dancing to the Earth, Wind &amp; Fire song. And he used the popularity of those videos to raise over a million dollars for charity. He’s also directed several music videos, including one that he made for one of my songs, back in 2022. And for this episode, we’re talking as much about a music video as the song within it. And that song is <a href="https://music.apple.com/gr/song/you-only-live-once/299740483">"You Only Live Once" by The Strokes.</a> <a href="https://www.dropout.tv/">Demi's new special, Demi Adejuyigbe is Going to do One (1) Backflip, is on Dropout TV. </a> For more info, visit <a href="https://songexploder.net/demi-adejuyigbe">songexploder.net/demi-adejuyigbe.</a>

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 Out, which came out in July 2025. This November, they were nominated for 5 Grammys, including Album of the Year. They were also nominated for Best Rap Song, for “The Birds Don’t Sing.” It’s a song that they made after the death of both of their parents in the span of just a few months. For this episode, I asked Pusha T, Malice, and Pharrell about the making of that song, which also features contributions from John Legend and Stevie Wonder.  For more info, visit <a href="https:songexploder.net/clipse">songexploder.net/clipse.</a>