Song Exploder

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 from The Warning called “Boy From School.” You might have heard it in the second season of the show Beef on Netflix—the band’s also in the show—or you might have heard it on The Simpsons. You could have also heard the song in my car all the time in 2006. So I was very excited to talk to Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip about how “Boy from School” was made.For more info, visit songexploder.net/hot-chip.

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 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 songexploder.net/hit-boy.

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,‘ which is already out in theaters, and comes to Netflix on December 12. I talked to Rian about a piece of music that had a profound impact on him, which was the overture to ‘Das Rheingold‘ by Richard Wagner. For more info, visit songexploder.net/rian-johnson.

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 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 & 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 "You Only Live Once" by The Strokes.Demi's new special, Demi Adejuyigbe is Going to do One (1) Backflip, is on Dropout TV. For more info, visit songexploder.net/demi-adejuyigbe.

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 individual talents, their musical chemistry together, and the ups and downs of their romantic relationship all eventually became legendary. And yet, despite all that, the Buckingham Nicks album went out of print not long after it came out. For over 50 years, it wasn’t available, until it finally got re-mastered and re-released in September 2025. So for this episode, I spoke to both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham about the making of one of the songs from that album, called “Frozen Love.” It’s the only song on the album where they’re credited as co-writers, and it’s the song that led Mick Fleetwood to invite Lindsey Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac. But Lindsey would only join if Stevie could, too, and that’s how that story began. So this episode is about a beginning and an ending. It’s the story of how Stevie and Lindsey first met, and how they made "Frozen Love," and how that song really led to the end of their band. I also want to mention that not only was Buckingham Nicks out of print for all those decades, no one has heard the isolated tracks that you’re about to hear. To make this episode, there was an epic search for the original master tape from Sound City, the studio where they recorded the album with producer Keith Olsen. It took months, but the tape was finally tracked down and digitized, and it feels very special to be able to present this for the first time here, along with the memories and stories from Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. For more info, visit songexploder.net/buckingham-nicks.

"Take On Me" by A-ha is an iconic hit of the 1980s. It came out in October 1985 with an equally iconic music video that helped define the age of MTV. It hit #1 in the US and in countries all over the world. And it's still massively popular today. It currently has over two and a half billion streams on Spotify. So, with all of that, it's easy to imagine that this was all inevitable. But actually, the song took so many steps and missteps before it became the hit that everybody knows. I talked to Paul Waaktaar-Savoy from A-ha, who wrote the original bones of the song back when he was a teenager in Norway, years before it came out. The song actually came out and flopped TWICE in the UK, before it found a foothold in the US. So for this episode, Paul took me through the whole history of the song, and all the different versions that existed. And he told me how he and his bandmates, Magne Furuholmen and Morten Harket, pushed and pushed and persevered. "Take On Me" was their first single as a band, and it made them the most successful Norwegian pop group of all time.For more info, visit songexploder.net/a-ha.

My guest today is Chef David Chang. He founded Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004. That was just the start of his incredible career – he’s opened several restaurants, winning awards and Michelin stars along the way, and becoming a fixture in the upper echelon of food. He’s the host of the Netflix shows Ugly Delicious and Dinner Time Live, as well as his own podcast, The Dave Chang Show. For this episode, I talked to Dave about the song “I See a Darkness.” It's the title track on the album by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, aka Will Oldham, which came out in 1999. Later, Johnny Cash would cover “I See a Darkness” in 2000, as a duet with Will Oldham, as part of Johnny Cash’s acclaimed American series.You can get Bonnie "Prince" Billy’s "I See a Darkness" on vinyl or digital here.For more info, visit songexploder.net/david-chang.