Switched on Pop - Hrishikesh Hirway made an album about running out of time — in no time

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Hrishikesh Hirway, host of Song Exploder, returns with his first album in fifteen years, In the Last Hour of Light, made under a premise that's almost contradictory for a podcaster built around isolated stems: session players who had never heard the songs, vocals tracked live in the room, no click track, and no overdubs.  The layered style that defines current pop production is itself a relatively recent development. Hirway's record  reaches back to the older live-tracking tradition that shaped the 1950s and 60s Bollywood recordings he grew up listening to in his parents' house. The album is about memory and so it’s appropriate that the music is recorded whole  in all its beautiful imperfections. Songs Discussed Hrishikesh Hirway "Things Change Even Now" Hrishikesh Hirway "Stray Dogs" Hrishikesh Hirway "The Ocean" Hrishikesh Hirway "Home Movies" Adrienne Lenker “Anything” Chuck Berry "Maybellene" The Beatles "Twist and Shout" James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" Sidney Bechet "The Sheik of Araby" Les Paul & Mary Ford "How High the Moon" The Beach Boys "Good Vibrations" The Beatles “A Day In The Life” Queen "Bohemian Rhapsody" Jacob Collier "With the Love in My Heart" Brandi Carlile "You and Me on the Rock" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada.

All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, economy. and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-U for free at O-D-O-D-O-O-O-com. You're listening to Switched-on-Pop, where musicians take apart their songs piece by piece and tell the story of how they were made? I'm Rishi K. Sherway. Welcome to Switched-on-Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

And we're joined by the amazing Richie Cash hereway. Richie Cash, you are a musician. You're a songwriter, you're a producer, you're a composer. You are a maker of podcasts. Of course, the great music podcast, song Exploder. But we want to have you on today to reveal some of the most important lessons about making records through your very own music and your new album in the last hour of light. Here's your song, Things Change Even Now.

Things Change Even Now. watching you breathe in and out eyes close from the strain I know you're not one to complain Welcome Thank you so much It's so great to be here Especially with both of you at the same time

This is such an honor I was also thinking as you were listing all those nouns I think I often hover over nouns wondering like at what point you get to call yourself the noun. I feel much more comfortable with the verbs. I can say like, I make music or I have a podcast that I make or, yeah, I am trying to learn pottery. But like the idea of then saying, you know, I am a composer. I have composed a score for films like three times in my life.

But I don't know at what point you get entry into the club where you get to put the blanker on your name. Yes. I like adjectives myself, you know, handsome, talented, hyper-intelligence. Business cards. I'm good with those. Well, I feel like this is a great place to begin because you talk so much about processing creativity. And I want to do that around your projects. Before we get into your music, I want to talk so long as well for a minute.

Could you share how you introduce your podcast each week with us? Yeah. At the top of every episode, I say, you're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. Why piece by piece? Well, one of the things that I was most excited about when I started the show was the idea of sharing people's stems, sharing how a song looked from the person's perspective who made it. Because as a bedroom musician for so many years, I knew that. I would spend so much time working on just like one little part, one section, you know, the mix on these three guitars that we're going to all be playing this one interlocking,

finger-picking part. But then that just becomes one small layer within the entire stereo mix. And there's drums and there's vocals and there's all these other things going on. And that's the goal. That's the end result. But I just felt like people would really appreciate hearing, the individual pieces as well. I sort of thought of it like when you get to try the individual ingredients that go into your favorite dish and then you start to understand

what you're actually eating. Like here's the cooked meal. Here's the cooked final thing. But that little hint of this thing, that's ginger. And here's what ginger tastes like on its own. So you get a sense for both what went into it

and how it transformed to become the thing that you're experiencing. So one of the reasons I love listening to Song Exploder each week is that that it is so clearly made by a musician. So tell us a little bit about how you got your start in music. Yeah, well, I have been playing in bands since high school.

I was playing drums in bands, and by the end of school, I started to learn guitar and started to try writing songs of my own. And then when I got to college, I really wanted to find that again. Then I did, I found some bandmates. and we made our first album. And I started touring, and one of the guys in the band was a year ahead. So when we were seniors, he was gone.

And so I started just playing shows on my own, just playing under my own name, and then changed to the name of the 1am radio. And I did that. That was sort of my moniker for the next 12 years. In the house we will make someday. We'll sleep in on Sunday. I love that you were the 1 a.m. radio because I feel like 1.m. radio has a very particular voice.

Nate used to do late night radio hosting when he was back in college. And you had a different radio voice at that point. Yes. Joe Flowers, after hours, spinning you the best in jazz and blues from 2 a.m. to 5.30 in the morning every Monday night. Wow. And does Joe Flowers exist in any form these days? No, he's sort of transformed into the character Joe Treble, who is a forensic musicologist investigator, who has made a few appearances on the podcast. But no, he just lives in the archives at this point. Yeah. I feel like you have many voices. I love listening to your various shows because depending on who you're chatting with, different parts of your personality emerge. And when you're on your own and doing the narration for Song Exploder, I think we really get that 1am radio. voice that really hushed.

It draws you in so much. It's like, I want to listen closer because when someone talks more quietly, you're like, oh, this is important. And with one-am radio, you had some sync placements. You were releasing music. But then you go off and begin the podcast. Why did you start Song Explorer? The 1-A.m. radio kind of felt like it fell into a ditch,

or I drove it into a ditch or something. I was stuck somewhere around 2012. The last 1am radio album came out in April of 2011, actually almost exactly 15 years ago. And that was my fourth album, and I'd been doing it for over a decade. And it felt like the project and my music had kind of grown in this slow, incremental way. And maybe that was normal. and maybe that's fine and healthy, but I really got in my head about it because for the last few years, I had finally kind of achieved having music be my living.

What I had dreamt of being a musician full-time, I'd gotten there a few years ago. And as exciting as that was, it also changed my relationship to music and what my expectations were and sort of what the pressure was, because now I'm trying to pay my bills with it and not just like the bills today, but also could I pay the bills tomorrow? in the month after that. So I felt like I really needed this to work beyond just from an artistic level. I was like, well, this is now my job. How am I going to do this? And I put a lot into the fourth album in terms of expectations of like, okay, maybe this

could be the one that goes. Maybe this could be the one that changes what tier of artist I am or something like that. And then that didn't end up happening. We got to do cool things. and I got to play some great shows, but it felt like an incremental change as opposed to an exponential one. So that just felt like,

I couldn't see a way forward after that. I couldn't see a way forward rather to that exponential change. I was like, I just put all of that. It took me four years to make that album from the previous album. Maybe that's it. Like maybe I can't expect anything else. Maybe I can't do any better than this.

And it's just going to continually be just like an inch forward, an inch forward. But meanwhile, the rest of my life is moving much, faster than that. So I kind of felt like I needed to take a break. Every time I would try writing songs at that point, I felt like nothing could live up to those expectations. You know, and I wouldn't even let a song breathe, you know, like I would play a G on a guitar and I'd be like, derivative. You know, I like, I couldn't even get started. So I was feeling kind of stuck and trying to figure out what I was going to do. And I think in the meantime, I was,

exploring like what other ideas do I have if I'm not putting my foot on the gas as hard as I can just on music and just on this project. What else might I be open to? And so in those next couple of years, I did a whole bunch of different things. I scored a couple of movies. That was my first chance scoring films. I started another band called Moors with Lakeith Stanfield, where I didn't have to write lyrics because that was the biggest part of the pressure for me. I was just making the beats. I loved working with him, pass him instrumentals, and he'd write to them,

and then that was a really fun project. And one of the other projects was this idea for a podcast where I could interview somebody and using their stems get the inside story. What was their perspective on making the song? And while they tell that story, people could hear all of these parts

that led to the final thing. You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh, Hereway. So this is something of a return for you. This is 15 years since your last album. Yeah.

And this new one, in the last hour of light, My favorite time of day. We want to explode this album a little bit with you. Let's start with the opening track, Stray Dogs. Maybe we can take it apart piece by piece. Sounds great. Back of stray dogs by my uncles how terrible. Beautiful stuff.

Thank you. I just heard all these new things I had not heard before in the track. Like I heard this like, there's like some background synth. It's really haunting and beautiful. Yeah. Okay. So to get into your record, I spoke with a friend of yours. My name is Philip Weinrobe, and I'm a music producer living in the Hudson Valley.

Philip Weinrope is your producer of this album, and he's produced many of my favorite records by Adrian Lanker, Tom Berlin, Theo Katzman, Billy Martin, so many great things. He's one of these producers with a very unique process on how he makes a record. These are my standard working parameters. Basically, we're going to get a bunch of musicians together who you don't know and who have never heard your songs, and they won't even necessarily know your name. They're just going to show up and be like, hey, who, yeah, nice to meet you, what's your name?

And then you're going to like literally play them your song on the piano or on the guitar. And then we'll like spend two or three hours and like figure it all out together, and then that's going to be the record. Why on earth would you expose yourself to this method of writing, and how would we hear that being revealed

in a song like Straight Dogs? When I first reached out to Phil, it was because I was a fan of his work that Adrian Lanker records are so important to me and I love them so much. All I knew was the final product. I had no idea how he actually got there. but I asked if you'd be interested and sent demos and got word back saying, yep, super into it.

Let's get on a phone call. And so I was like, great, okay, this is a big deal for me because I'd never worked with a producer like this before. I'd never made an album with a producer. On all the one-name radio stuff, I produced everything. And I was excited about that idea. I was excited about the idea of sort of getting out of my head and letting collaboration in, because inside my own head, you know, like before, like, that was the danger zone. I had already learned that within the confines of my own head, I could get paralyzed and, you know, just start to feel really bad. But if I brought in other people, I could rely on their enthusiasm, even if I lost my own.

Okay, but this is crazy to me because what Phil told me, when you had those conversations, it was not one conversation. He said it was hours of processing. before we've been getting in the room because, you know, this method of making stuff is a bit uncanny. And he says that, you know, there's a whole purpose behind it. I just have always found that, like, that's where in the creative process, too, so much of the good stuff is. It's like in the beginning. And in the initial excitement phase of something, as opposed to the, like, highly detailed, combed over phase. it also like involves creating

like a sense of like danger and like high stakes for the people involved because that's what's going to like make you feel like awake and alive in that creative performance. You had used the word danger

in this sort of like feeling that it was even approaching this and yet he wants things to make even more dangerous. Yeah. When we spoke, I said you know, okay, so I have Those demos you heard, you know, and I actually had taken those demos pretty far. Some of them were very fleshed out, had a lot of production and stuff behind them,

partly because that's just what I need to do in order to wrap my head around what the song is and what it means and, you know, what I'm going for. So they had full arrangements with me playing lots of instruments and harmonies and things like that. And I said, like, do you want to work the way that I had worked before where it was like, I'll give you my recordings and we can add to them and maybe edit from them and turn them into the final recordings. or would you rather start over? And he was like, oh, no, no, we'll start over. And I was like, okay, that's fine. And then he told me this idea that, like, we'll have, you know, session players come in and we'll record everything in a matter of hours.

I was like, in a matter. What? Like, I have songs that I've released that I spent literally years on that had lived in some version for years as I tweaked it over months and months and months. So the idea of the actual commitment to the recording taking just a few hours felt, yeah, dangerous is a good word, reckless, maybe. Is there a song on the album that really exemplifies this dangerous, reckless process of making music? I mean, I think it's really across all of it because one of the things that was most dangerous, and the scariest part for me was that in addition to recording the music this way,

I was supposed to record my vocals live as well. And that was unfathomable to me because it's just so vulnerable. You know, to sing and to sing these words, I want to deliver them the best way I possibly can. And so, like, I need several shots at it. Let me do it the normal way. Let me take several takes,

and then we can put together one comped version. You know, like, that's just the way, that's normal. me and the idea that he's like, no, no, we're going to, you're going to sing while the rest of the band plays. And I said, what if I don't get it right and everybody else is great? Or what if I do get it right, but somebody else messes up? He said, if the thing that we're going to focus on is you're singing. So we won't use a take that doesn't feel good in terms of your singing. And if somebody messes up or whatever, it's fine. He's like, no. And also, you know, we're not

going to play with headphones. We're not going to use a click track. So I can't even like listen to myself as I'm singing. He said, no, I want everybody to hear what everybody's actually doing. I want you to all be tuned into each other. He said, if you think about your favorite records, I bet if you went back and you listened, you'd realize how many moments where the singer is not singing perfectly in tune. And not only do you love them despite that, I think you might love them because of that. All those little moments make it feel like real people are making music in a room together. And so that's what we should go for. That's what you should aim for. And just trust me. So anyway, so I think that stray dogs is just as good of an example as all of these,

on all of these songs, I'm singing with that method. Could I propose a song that I feel like we can really hear that method come through and I think hear a lot of that vulnerability. In the second chorus of the ocean, you have made it through. You survived. We're hearing your voice with no breaks, no cuts, no comps, and this very intimate moment of reflection. My favorite part of that recording is one thing that was overdubbed, which is my friend, Oaidae's voice. But in that time, there was a power that I could invite and I still survive. I feel like part of what we're learning is that, you know, you begin in this moment of sort of writer's block. And you go and you get to learn all these amazing things from all these, the best musicians in the world.

You've spoken to all of my personal heroes, I imagine many of yours. And the entire time you have been breaking things down piece by piece listening to stems. Project is the exact opposite. it rather than approaching, releasing your next album from all of the wisdom that you have learned breaking things down piece by piece, instead, you are baking the thing whole from the get-go. What do you think that that gives the music and what did it give to you? I do have to recognize that like Song Exploder itself was born out of this idea of how I'd made music myself.

You know, I'd always done things in this kind of layer by layer way, this kind of like half electronic half folk bedroom recording style. And then even when I started working with other folks, a lot of them came from the same kind of tradition. So something built into my understanding of music was just what I brought to it personally. And so when I started Song Exploder, all of that assumption kind of went into it. I was like, well, of course you can hear every single piece on its own. You can isolate everything and hear exactly what's going on with nothing else because that was like the house I'd built for myself and I'd just been living there. Phil said when I had my first reaction around, I was like, this is a crazy way of making music. Like, what are you talking about?

He said, it's not crazy actually that actually, for the majority of recorded music, that is how music was made. The thing that I was used to was a more recent phenomenon and actually quite a big big, departure from the quote-unquote normal way of working, and he was just returning to that. It's funny because it just makes me think about there have been times when I haven't been able to do episodes of Song Exploder because someone didn't have isolated stems because they made music in this way. They're really like, yeah, we just put up a bunch of mics. And so here to so everything's in everything. And I was like, oh, I'm so sorry that that's not going to work for the podcast. And of course, I didn't.

know because it's not like you can still have great songs and popular songs that are made that way. I just, it felt like I had to rewire my entire brain, not just from my own music career, but then from this whole second chapter of making the podcast. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-wide. fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try O-D-Fer-Free at O-D-O-D-O-O-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-com. Support for this show comes from FetchPet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, A pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of vet bills.

You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save. Right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Visit BetMGM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly.

19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. In preparing for this conversation, I thought it would be fun to think of some other great records that were made in, as you said, the way that records were made for the first half of recorded music.

The first track that I thought of in that classic style of recording is Chuck Berry's Mabelene. It's Mabelene, why can't you be true? Why can't you be true? You didn't start doing the thing to you. So Mabelene was recorded in 1955. That was Chuck Berry's first time in the studio. And it is a full take all the way through. I think you can hear the roughness of his guitar playing.

You get all of the imperfections. But it was the 36th take. I don't think you got that same amount of takes when you were working with Philip. No, no. But that just sounds awesome, right? Even just listening to that little clip, you're making me have a thought that I don't.

know that I've articulated to myself before, which is this album, so much of it is about memory. Like, the reason why it's called in the last hour of light is because it's about time and it's about my relationship to time and feeling how much has gone by already and how little might be left. And so much of what I was writing about was about looking back on my life. So there's like a nostalgia sort of built into the content of the songs. And, One of the reasons I started making music in the first place, one of the reasons I got excited about music was because of the first music that I used to listen to,

which was old Bollywood recordings that my parents would play in the house, stuff from around this time from like the 50s and the 60s. It's a huge orchestra and singers, but I believe it's also all recorded live. And there's something in the sound of the recording. You know, it's the quality of the tape that makes it nostalgic, but it's also the quality of the playing and the birds. performance and those, I think that hearing those imperfections and just that bleed.

It's not just that it's an old song or its old tape. It is about the way it was performed that I think lends itself to that. Right. So I was just thinking that maybe actually the way that we made the album is actually really fitting for a bunch of songs that are about memory and we're about reaching back to the earliest parts of my life because the earliest parts of my life were so influenced by music that was made and sounded this way. Maybe going through a bit more music history

and so my own influences in contrast to we heard about 36 takes. I want to play a song for you that happened in just one take. Twist and shout by the Beatles was recorded in basically a one-day session at EMI, now Abbey Road in 1963. They recorded the entirety, more or less.

less of Please Please Me in three-hour sprints and twist and shout was recorded in one take at 10 p.m. After playing all day, John Lennon had blown his voice out. He'd had a cold. And to help his cold, he was like sucking on lozenges and drinking warm milk, which any vocal coach will tell you, you do not drink dairy when you need to record. And so they play that. And George Martin, the producer says, you know, I don't know how they do it. We've been recording all day, but the longer we go, the better they get. Lennon remarked that the last song nearly killed me. My voice wasn't the same for a long time after. Every time I swallowed, it was like sandpaper. And I think it is that sandpaper-like quality, that imperfection, everything feeling broken that we can love in recording. That's so funny. Yeah,

I also got sick during, um, during recording. Oh, no. And so, um, I was, I was drinking so much tea. And also, you know, um, yeah. Shout out throat coat. Yeah, throat coat tea and loz Shadda, Fisherman friend. Yeah, exactly. Oh, fisherman, yeah. Just trying to get to some place where I could sing. And yeah, on some of those songs, I'm definitely, you know, just barely out of the, like, creeping out of congestion. I mean, I think that the imperfections in the voice can lend so much emotion.

You also talked about the process of basically making the sense. songs live with these session musicians. And so one other classic track that I found in my research that did just that was James Brown when he was recording Papa's Got a Brand New Bag. You're basically hearing him instruct the band how to play this song. I got to catch where I can swing and I can't swing it. It's a lot of words, man. That was good, though.

Yeah, something. I'm fucking preaching, man. This is a hit. That song was like seven minutes long. Wow. And so to speed it up, they literally sped it up and cut it down to a two-minute single. Wow. Just because you do something in a take doesn't mean you can't manipulate the recording afterwards.

That's true. Actually, we did speed one of the songs. Did you really? Yeah. What is the effect of doing that? Why would you do that? I think after the fact, we just felt like, you know, let's try it. Like, let's see if this just how it might change it a little bit.

you know, just bumping it up a tiny bit. And I think that's what we ended up using that for the album. We have some examples here of records that went from being, you know, 36 takes to one take to things that are slightly manipulated afterwards to make them a little more radio-friendly. I also wanted to share some of the history of how we got out of making records as they always used to be made. Your assumption making Song Exploder and having been a musician making music in your room was like, The way that we've always made things is you just put them apart together piece by piece. Like it makes the most sense.

Especially if you're like of the one-man band variety, right? Where you're playing almost everything and you're singing and you're layering yourself on top. I was really surprised to learn that one of the earliest multi-tracked recordings was all the way back from 1941. Sinibachet has a track called the Sheik of Araby. And the way that he did this, this is a one-man band. He plays everything. He would take a lathe recorded acetate. disc, play it in the room, and then record the sound of the acetate disc and him playing

yet another instrument. So this is Sidie Bessé in 1941. There were so many artifacts, sound and noise in that way of recording. And so it's not until we get magnetic tape, which is first developed. in Germany as a cleaner medium, less noise, less hiss. And one of the earliest recordings of multi-track magnetic tape is made by the guitarist and producer Les Paul. In 1949, he modifies an early Amex tape machine so that he can do sound on sound recording,

basically layering himself. And his song, How High the Moon, recorded in 1951 in his Jackson Heights, Queens apartment home studio. It has him playing 12 parts on the guitar, him doing everything. and Mary Ford singing 12 different layers of vocals. Obviously he's known for his name on the Gibson guitar, Les Paul, but he's probably much more important for having put together one of the first eight-track tape recorders and helps develop music technology where we can start layer multiple tracks on top of each other.

By the 1960s, it becomes commonplace that studios have at least a 14. track machine so you can do four different tracks. And that gives us tracks like good vibrations, which is one of the most expensive songs in history. Once you have more options, you spend more money and more time. Good vibrations by the Beach Boys cost $50,000 in its time, which is about $450,000 today. It took place over 17 recording sessions, 90 hours of tape compiled down to three minutes and 36 seconds of music. The entire album of Pet Sounds was only $70,000 in comparison. So they basically spent the same amount of money making one song as they made making an entire album.

Fast forward a year to 1967, the Beatles making Sergeant Pepper's spent five months making that album 700 hours of studio time. It literally took 30 times as long as it took to make Please Please Me. As we move forward into the 70s, Bohemian Rhapsody, one of the most overdubbed songs of all time. It's estimated there's 180 overdubs on that song. In the 1970s, we start to have 24-track tape, but even 24 tracks were not enough to contain Queen. Freddie Mercury needed layers and layers and layers. And if we fast forward to today, you know, Jacob Collier had to extend the number of tracks possible within Logic Pro. because he had pushed the boundaries with his song

with the love in my heart, which had 720 tracks in it. Now Apple supports a thousand tracks. You know, he too needs layers and layers and layers of vocals. And so there's been all this progress in recording technology, and yet there's still a need to go back to how records were made before the 60s, before we were able to easily overdub ourselves.

and that's the path you've taken. Yeah, I remember this interview that I'd done for Song Exploder with Brandy Carlisle and that I think planted some kind of seed that Phil was then kind of encouraging to grow out of my brain because she'd said this thing. I loved what she said so much that I started the episode with it, and I pulled it up if you want to hear it. Episode 22, February 9, 2022, Brandy Carlisle, you and me on The Rock featuring Lucius. Did you do a lot of like rehearsal pre-production of this song before? you started actually recording it for real?

No, I'm very anti-rehearsal prior to recording. Why's that? Well, because I'm superstitious, I believe that every song has a moment. And it's a really fragile moment where you write a song and you know it, but you don't have it yet. Like it's still a risk, it could still derail, anything could still happen. I love the way that she put that. and it's really, it echoes so much of what Phil said, too. When you listen to the album now,

do you hear any mistakes that you're glad are there? Oh, that's a nice way of putting it. There are things that are in the album that are so unexpected in the moment. Things that other folks did, you heard that sort of like ghostly, eerie layer in stray dogs. Yeah. That was played by my friend Cole Kamen Green.

For that song, he played this thing called an EVI, an electronic valve instrument, where you blow into it, and there are like synth parameters that you can adjust with knobs. So the velocity is determined by how hard you blow into it and have it affect the volume or the pitch or all kinds of different things. And so he essentially just improvised. over that whole song.

We didn't do a lot of takes, but from one take to the next, it was always different. And that was, I think, a fundamental aspect of a lot of the players that came in. Shazad Ismaili is another player on there. He played a bunch of instruments on the album.

He's somebody who won't play the same thing twice. One of my favorite things in the whole album is the piano solo that he takes in a song called Home Movies. And there are samples of my wife and her dad from an actual home movie that I'd had in the demo. And Phil, saying, you know, since everything should be live, he's like, okay, well, why don't you give me those samples?

And I'll play them out of an amp in the room. And Shazad played this piano part that had never happened before that in any of the handful of rehearsals. And it sounds like an accident. I don't mean like what he's playing. He's playing accidentally. I mean, it sounds like somebody having an accident. Like, it sounds like a man falling or something like that. Rishi, you're making me realize that I think you have the perfect album title

that perfectly matches your process in the last hour of light invokes the twilight hour. And there are a lot of songs here about reflecting on your past, reflecting on mortality, those you've lost, and they're beautiful, powerful songs that need to be treated with a lot of care. There's danger in there, there's a vulnerability in there, as Phil and Brandy have evoked.

When you were in the last hour of light of our life, there's not time to spare. There's not time to go do another take. You just have to put it down. I think you've done that. Thank you so much. Charlie, can you play the very first thing we listened to in this conversation, the beginning of stray dogs?

As soon as I hear those drums, it's like an announcement that this album is going to sound different than what you're used to. Wow, really? Well, the clarity of it, the liveliness of it, it feels like you're in the room where this is all happening. And even before you start singing, I'm already sort of primed emotionally because there's this like texture and grain to the sound that we don't hear in a lot of music. And I say that without any shade. I think the hyper compressed and vivid sound of a lot of multi-tracked popular music like we've been talking about is really powerful. But there was just something so organic and so present about even just the first seconds of that song that I found really emotional to listen to. So to me, I think this is a very emotional.

This kind of experiment that you've done is something that I want to keep listening for. And I'm curious, and I'll be curious to see what other artists follow that playbook as well. Yeah. The day before I left for the recording, I had recorded with Lizzie McAlpine, an episode of Song Exploder. And she talked about recording her album live as well. She had actually made the entire thing, and then she went back and remade it live. And she talked about how happy she was that she'd done that. And after the interview was over, you know, and she was getting ready to leave,

I was like, thank you so much for saying that because that's what I'm about to do. And I'm just scared out of my mind. It feels insane. And she's like, no, it's really, really special. And the fact that just other people can see that, the fact that you can hear that really means a lot. I'm too close to it at this point to know. And I might forever be too close to it. But I can appreciate it in other people's music.

So you're about to take this on the road with, like, the best special guests on the planet. We've got just to name a few, Jason Manzoukis, Samin Nosrat, Allison Russell, Adam Scott, Joshua Molina. Lots of fun shows coming up, but you also are going to be continuing to write music, I'm sure of, and you're going to be continuing to make Song Exploder. I'm curious about how making this record is going to change your process going forward with your own music and your own reporting. I think that the idea of, hmm, let me see. start again. There's no retakes. Right.

Damn it. Something that I definitely have learned throughout the last few years of working this way is that collaboration is just a relief for me. It lets me go back to enjoying music. And I think part of what I love about it is the possibility of surprise. I used to think that the internal workings of my own mind is where everything needed to come from. And if I didn't

somehow generate everything on my own, that was like a sign of like a lack of originality or like weakness in some kind of way or, you know, a lack of artistry. And I've gotten to a point now where I'm like, actually, that whole setup is a myth, the idea that like you create something entirely on your own, like every single idea. All of those things have been a collaboration of some kind, even if it was unintentional between, like, you know, where you grew up and what the weather was and what you read and what somebody said on the bus and that you overheard, you know, like, all of that stuff. So the idea of just bringing other people in more explicitly to shake up the things that you think you know and come up with something that you'd never expect has been really important to me. And that's

something that I hope that I can keep doing. Thank you for collaborating with us today. Thank you. It's been a blast. It has been a blast for me too. Thank you so much. The long-awaited crossover. Switched on Pop is produced by Raina Cruz, edited by Lizas Soap, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, video by Nick Rips, music by Jossi Adams, and Zach Tenore of Arc, Iris, remember with Vox Media Podcast, Network and Vulture, which is part of New York Mag. You can subscribe at NOMag.com slash pod. Reach out to us on... Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets. Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different.

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