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A music fan reaches for a collection of cassette tapes

Photo: MOHD RASFAN/AFP/Getty Images

Feature
Cassette Tapes Are Back (And Cool Again) record-store-day-2018-inside-comeback-cassette-tapes

Record Store Day 2018: Inside The Comeback Of Cassette Tapes

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It's no joke: Cassettes have fast-forwarded in popularity and re-emerged as the underdog music format of choice for experiential listeners
Julian Ring
GRAMMYs
Apr 18, 2018 - 8:56 am

Streaming is saving the music industry and vinyl is in. So say the numbers, anyway. According to Nielsen Music, listeners racked up 400 billion streams in 2017, a catalyst for the industry's overall growth by more than 12 percent. Meanwhile, as album sales continue to plummet, vinyl LPs have made up a larger share of the market each year since 2005.

Though vinyl has made a record-setting (and much-publicized) comeback in recent years, it's still not music's fastest-growing physical medium. That honor belongs to … the cassette tape.

You read correctly: Cassette sales in the U.S. have more than quadrupled since 2011, with 174,000 tapes sold in the last year alone. Data from Nielsen Music points to a few obvious explanations. Cassette pressings for high-profile releases like Taylor Swift's Reputation, Jay-Z's 4:44, Lana Del Rey's Lust For Life, and Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy soundtracks are selling well at retailers like Urban Outfitters, which also offers cassette players and recorders with USB adaptability.

Classic acts like AC/DC and the Wu-Tang Clan are also getting in on the trend, issuing small runs of classic albums — Back In Black and Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), respectively — on cassette for 2018 Record Store Day.

There's even Cassette Store Day, a smaller, scrappier celebration dedicated exclusively to the tape format. Each October for the past five years, independent labels have made exclusive tapes by artists like Green Day and the White Stripes available at record shops around the world. Sean Bohrman, the founder of cassette-only label Burger Records and an organizer of the celebration in the U.S., says Cassette Store Day's underdog spirit keeps it relevant.

"It's about showing stores that they can sell cassettes," he says, "because there are still a ton of doubters out there who think it's a joke or that it's just nostalgia."

IT'S CASSETTE STORE DAY AT AMOEBA! . . . . . . . #cassettestoreday #tapes #newrelease #recordstore #thewhitestripes #amoebamusic

A post shared by Cassette Store Day (@cassettestoreday) on Oct 14, 2017 at 4:30pm PDT

Despite its growing availability in stores, much of the cassette's resurgence has played out online. A majority of tapes were purchased on the web in 2016, many from vendors such as Burger directly. That's in stark contrast to vinyl, which consumers overwhelmingly buy at brick and mortar stores.

In fact, it's hard to overstate just how much the internet has empowered the cassette's most ardent fans. Maintaining the DIY ethos that characterized the tape trading movement in the 1980s and 1990s, today's cassette culture comprises an entire online ecosystem with its own forums and marketplaces in which bands, labels and collectors buy and sell tapes for a fraction of the cost of an LP.

"I love cassettes for the experiential part — for slowing down the experience a little bit and having more choice in the matter, and not letting the whole process be impulsive." — Ari Rosenschein

For artists, the draw is as much financial as it is sentimental. Cassettes are cheap to produce — around $1.50 per tape versus $5.80 per vinyl record — and they can be ordered, produced and shipped in a matter of days.

"With cassettes, there is a lower risk financially," says Ari Rosenschein, a Seattle multi-instrumentalist who performs as STAHV. He began issuing music on cassette in high school, and more recently released tapes under his own moniker and as a member of the band Teacher. The latter have sold out.

STAHV cassettes are available for purchase! First orders ship tomorrow. https://t.co/IL9kvbaBrV pic.twitter.com/tDuU0S2dC0

— Ari Rosenschein (@arirosenschein) February 2, 2018

"Pressing vinyl is extraordinarily expensive, and yet people are doing it like crazy because you can sell them," says Rosenschein. "With cassettes, you're not going to be able to sell them for as much, but they really don't cost very much to make. It's sort of like making pins versus making T-shirts."

Rosenschein also releases his music on LP and digitally so he treats cassettes like a "token" for hardcore fans. He orders them in small quantities, selling them at shows and online through platforms such as Bandcamp.

"There's a culture of people looking for these limited-edition pressings and weird, oddball runs of stuff," he says. "I've sold my cassettes on the idea that it's a very limited thing. … And there's a scarcity to it. Of the STAHV record, there's only 50 in the world, and they're kind of special."

Rosenschein is selling to people like Matt Mosz, a pizza delivery driver in the Chicago suburb of Naperville and a moderator of Reddit's r/cassetteculture forum. Mosz is 28 — young enough to have missed the cassette's heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s — and he claims nostalgia has little to do with his love of the format.

"I kinda grew up with [cassettes] being books on tape, and I had a handful of albums from high school," says Mosz. "But it was just albums that I got because they were cheap at the time and I was, like, 15 years old."

While working on his car, Mosz's mp3 player broke. A short time later, he stumbled upon a used bookstore that sold tapes for a quarter.

"They had a whole bunch of albums I really liked," he says. "In the matter of a summer, I went from having 10 cassettes in my collection to having 50. And it just spawned from there."

Matt Mosz's cassette collection

A selection of tapes in Matt Mosz's cassette collection
Photo: Courtesy of Matt Mosz

Seven years later, Mosz has amassed a collection of 500–600 tapes. While most of his early finds consisted of '90s rock (he's a big Foo Fighters and Nirvana fan), meeting other collectors online helped Mosz discover new music on cassette as well.

"I found out, 'Woah, new bands that are around now, that are just starting out, that are my age — they're putting music out on cassette," he says. "It's definitely opened up my range of music."

As a moderator of r/cassetteculture, Mosz now facilitates those connections himself, helping the forum's more than 12,000 members meet one another and share their hauls. On any given day, posts about fixing playback equipment, online sales and the merits of tape hiss litter the main page. Mosz has even organized semiregular mixtape swaps, where users create custom cassettes for one another that are full of songs the recipient might like.

"[It's] kind of the first moderating thing that I put into effect," he says. "You can get 10 to 20 people involved for it. … Some people really like the undertaking of making a mixtape, and will make three or four different mixes for different people, and participate that way to make sure everybody gets heard."

Mosz and Rosenschein say the extra time and work required to produce and play cassettes is part of their appeal. At a time when quickly sharing playlists has superseded recording tapes or burning CDs, cassettes are some of the last remaining musical objects that make a statement and encourage fans of all ages to listen to music with a purpose.

"The idea of people consuming music [via] this defiantly old-fashioned format is bigger than genre," Rosenschein says. "[You're seeing] this overarching group of people for whom an archaic format is not a deterrent, but actually is a positive. They're being a little rebellious in their choice of listening format."

"I love cassettes for the experiential part — for slowing down the experience a little bit and having more choice in the matter, and not letting the whole process be impulsive," he adds. "You have to be a little bit more conscious with cassettes."

Catching Up On Music News Powered By The Recording Academy Just Got Easier. Have A Google Home Device? "Talk To GRAMMYs"

(Julian Ring is a music journalist and curator. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, NPR Music, The Wall Street Journal and Consequence of Sound, and he has written for the Recording Academy since 2010. At Pandora, Ring oversees music blogging and reviews independent submissions. He enjoys playing the guitar and hiking near his home in Oakland, Calif.)

(The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Pandora Media, Inc., nor was the article written on Pandora Media, Inc.'s behalf.)

Record Store Day

Photo: Adam Berry/Getty Images

Feature
Drop The Needle On Record Store Day In NYC record-store-day-2018-needle-drops-nyc

Record Store Day 2018: The Needle Drops In NYC

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With the biggest day of the year for independent record stores upon us, go behind the scenes at three of New York City's best vinyl shops
Nate Hertweck
GRAMMYs
Apr 20, 2018 - 4:40 pm

Record store culture and the physical music product experience it revolves around are alive and well in 2018. The proof is everywhere: vinyl sales are still surging, cassettes are cool again, HD vinyl is on the near horizon, and record stores continue to matter — just ask Record Store Day 2018 ambassadors Run The Jewels.

No day of the year celebrates the vinyl-loving lifestyle more than Record Store Day (on April 21 this year) and nowhere is the real-time churn of this phenomenon more vibrant or visible than in New York City.

New York's energy, density and diversity are conducive to vinyl culture. And Record Store Day's mixture of exclusive releases speaks to the city's storied musical history, and local events make it a fulcrum for the crossfade between hardcore enthusiasts and transient super-fans. All involved are looking for that vinyl vibe.

"People get a tactile experience and an auditory experience with records that they would never get with digital files," says Daniel Givens, store clerk at Good Records NYC in the East Village. "Even if they made virtual records, you wouldn't be able to touch the record and smell the cover and look at the big picture on the cover, that sort of thing."

Since 2008, Record Store Day has gathered independent record store owners and employees for a celebration of the unique culture surrounding the nearly 1,400 independently-owned record stores in the U. S. The resulting holiday accounts for a huge spike in business for most shops.

"It is definitely our biggest day of the year," says Dennis Manzanedo, head buyer at Rough Trade NYC in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which boasts an attached music venue. "We go full in and try to carry every title that we can. We have events all day long. People start lining up the night before. The whole staff is really into it … we build up to the day, and get the store ready."

Record Store Day Line

Rough Trade is making the most of Record Store Day this year, hosting live bands in the attached music venue, a book signing, a listening party, beer tasting, and more. 

"It's like a party atmosphere, you know, people are in a really good mood. We've got megaphones to announce to people outside and let them know when things are selling out." — Dennis Manzanedo, Rough Trade NYC

Each year, as the holiday's main event, there are dozens of Record Store Day special releases that get distributed throughout the country, creating a buzz among collectors and fans, and many record stores see the holiday as an opportunity to give their clientele a little something extra.

"It's our hands-down busiest day of the year," says Jeff Conklin, new music uyer at Academy Records, which has multiple locations in town. "We try to have a lot of fun with it. We arrange with Stumptown Coffee to give out free coffee. We get doughnuts from a local doughnut shop and give them out … we try to make it fun for anybody who comes in the store."

Many music lovers who come out on Record Store Day are in search of exclusives. At Rough Trade, for instance, the line stretches down the block and some customers wait over four hours to search through the special release section. But ultimately record store culture is about so much more. It's about a like-minded gathering. It's about music.

"You'll see all of our regulars will be here, too, amongst a lot of people we've never seen before of course," says Manzanedo. "It's just become more than a sales day, it's more like a celebration, and that's why we like having the bands all day. You don't have to buy anything, you can just walk in, walk through the door and go right into the venue and watch bands for free all day. But if you want to look at the exclusive stuff that’s where the long line might take a couple hours to get in and a lot of people wait all day long."

https://twitter.com/AcademyRecords/status/987428592199102464

Both stores opening at 10am tomorrow. Closing at 8 or later depending on the scene.... pic.twitter.com/2kWntfZi3S

— Academy Records NYC (@AcademyRecords) April 20, 2018

"We open two hours earlier, about 10 a.m.," adds Conklin. "I usually get to the shop about 9 o'clock and generally there's already a line of about 20 people. By the time we open there's usually 50–60 people waiting to get in. I'd say during the day we see probably around 1,200–1,500 people come through the store."

But not every person or store in the record store community share the exuberance for the holiday. For better or worse, Record Store Day can feel like an Irish Pub on St. Patrick's Day — full of transient partiers, so to speak — and sometimes the costs of doing business can put smaller stores at risk.

"Record stores spend a lot of money pouring into the inventory that's offered for Record Store Day, and none of that merchandise is returnable, so whatever that store doesn't sell, they're stuck with," explains Givens, noting that his personal opinion on the matter comes from working at several different record stores throughout New York since Record Store Day launched. "I've seen it put a pinch in record stores' wallets because they want to support Record Store Day and they want to offer these exclusive titles to the customers, but it's always such a crapshoot of what people are actually looking for and what the stores actually are allotted based on their orders."

"Record Store Day should be every day, generally. It should be something that is celebrated not necessarily once a year where it's like a Black Friday thing where there's masses of people looking for the same thing like an Easter egg hunt." — Daniel Givens, Good Records NYC

Givens admits the special releases are not only a good selling point, but they have also gotten qualitatively better over the years. He also points out that many of the special titles are geared toward an older audience, or offer up repackagings of records that are already available.

"[A record] that you would generally be able to find in the record store for $10 or less," says Givens, "is reissued for Record Store Day on colored vinyl, or it has one bonus track, or it has a little bit of incentive for someone to buy it. But generally, it's the same record that people grew up listening to. For us, we deal mostly in second-hand records. …We will have some [special releases] but we're not carrying every title that's released by any means. That's not what our clientele is about."

https://twitter.com/GoodRecordsNYC/status/987404857521795072

GRAMMYs

Content Not Available

Still, the spirit of Record Store Day goes beyond the economics to celebrate the special role record stores play as the de facto headquarters for local music fans who crave something physical.

"Record stores still operate, not only obviously as a place to support music and musicians, but as a community space, where bands are still able to hang their fliers and people hang out and talk to each other and learn about music," "says Conklin.

"It's a real tactile, non-algorithm way to learn about new music and discover things that you might not find anywhere else." — Jeff Conklin, Academy Records

"I think it's important, just like a bookstore, that these sort of analog spaces exist so people don't lose touch with reality as they might in a digital world or with a digital experience," adds Givens.

With so many changes over the past few decades in the way fans consume music, the future of record stores has been uncertain for some time. But the oral tradition of word-of-mouth remains a big part of the discovery process for devoted music fans.

"I wasn't really sure when we opened up if people were still going to want to come in and treat it like a traditional store and talk to the employees and physically interact with the product and have conversations," says Manzanedo. "But it's become a place where people hang out. We have free wi-fi so you can hang out, sit on a couch, and read a magazine. But people also come in with lists and they're looking for recommendations."

Catching Up On Music News Powered By The Recording Academy Just Got Easier. Have A Google Home Device? "Talk To GRAMMYs"

Run The Jewels

Run The Jewels

Photo: Angela Weiss/Getty Images

News
What Are 2018's Record Store Day Exclusives? record-store-day-2018-exclusives-coming-april-21

Record Store Day 2018 Exclusives Coming April 21

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Coming soon, a vinyl-lovers dream-come-true day honors independent record stores by rewarding listeners who visit real stores to buy records with exclusive releases
Philip Merrill
GRAMMYs
Mar 7, 2018 - 1:15 pm

Record Store Day 2018 Ambassadors Run The Jewels and 10-time GRAMMY Award winner Taylor Swift are among those prepping special RSD2018 releases to make April 21 a day vinyl collectors and music lovers will remember. Exclusives and first releases include RTJ's "Stay Gold" Collector's Edition 12" single and colored-vinyl resissues of Swift's self-titled 2006 debut and her two multiple GRAMMY winning albums, 2008's Fearless and 2014's 1989.

Other first releases from multiple GRAMMY winners this year include Common, Ella Fitzgerald, Robert Glasper, Jason Isbell, Bruce Springsteen, and John Williams' Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

https://twitter.com/recordstoreday/status/971085512885899264

#RSD18 https://t.co/Mppu57r9vl pic.twitter.com/Q5DkvRsAJ3

— Record Store Day (@recordstoreday) March 6, 2018

The Record Store Day website's list starts at "Aa" for Aaliyah, goes to "Z" for Frank Zappa, and in between covers more classics and rarities such as David Bowie, John Coltrane, Madonna, and Bob Dylan performing with the Grateful Dead. As deep as this list is, news of new titles can also be expected, for example U2's recent addition.

Think about how to make this April 21 special for yourself, and be sure to get to your favorite independ record store early. Your record collection might thank you for the rest of your life.

Getting The Latest Music News Just Got Easier. Introducing: GRAMMY Bot. Find it On KIK and Facebook Messenger

Ed Sheeran photographed in 2017

Ed Sheeran

Photo: Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU/Getty Images

Feature
What Do Great Love Songs Have In Common? what-makes-ultimate-love-song

What Makes The Ultimate Love Song?

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Whether it's "Shape Of You," "You Belong With Me," "I Will Always Love You," "Un-Break My Heart," or "Earth Angel," go inside the anatomy of a great love song
Chuck Crisafulli
GRAMMYs
Feb 14, 2018 - 12:16 pm

The Beatles proclaimed that it was all you needed. Whitney Houston sang that she'd found the greatest of all. Kendrick Lamar rapped that it made him feel as powerful as Mike Tyson. And Bruno Mars insists that it's best served with strawberry champagne on ice.

Watch: GRAMMY Winners Name Favorite Love Songs

The element in question is, of course, love — an emotion potent enough to have inspired all manner of singers and songwriters for centuries. Words of love were set to music by the poets of ancient Greece and Rome, and passionate desire was a popular topic for medieval troubadours. The earliest example of a recorded voice is an 1860 phonautograph recording of "Au Clair De Lune," a traditional French folk song that is arguably about a late-night romantic encounter.

Whether spoken or sung, "I love you" would seem to be a fairly straightforward statement, but the feelings and circumstances behind those words can be complicated, which would explain why love songs come in an uncanny number of varieties.

There are songs for brand-new love (Ed Sheeran's "Shape Of You"); love that's stood the test of time (George Gershwin's much-covered "Our Love Is Here To Stay"); breakup songs (Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Getting Back Together"); make-up songs (Peaches And Herb's "Reunited"); songs that express love as something selfless and noble (Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You") and songs that express love as something a little more physical (Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing").

Love has clearly served as a well-tapped source of inspiration, but not all loves — and not all loves songs — are equal. While some love songs endure as classics — happily danced to at generations of weddings — plenty of others fade as quickly as a bad first date. Just a few bars of the best love songs can make hearts swell and eyes tear up, while other more-syrupy contenders induce cringes of horror or shrugs of indifference.

So, what is it that makes a great love song great?

"What makes a love song great is what makes any song great — you have to feel it, " says Diane Warren, a GRAMMY-winning songwriter who has added to the love song canon with such hits as "Because You Loved Me," sung by Celine Dion, "Un-Break My Heart, " sung by Toni Braxton, "There You'll Be," sung by Faith Hill, and the Cher No. 1 single "If I Could Turn Back Time."

"I think a great love song obviously has to have great lyrics and great content," says GRAMMY nominee Thomas Rhett, writer of romantic ditties such as "Sweetheart." "But I think sometimes, above that, melody is what attracts people."

"[A] perfect melody is always good because it allows you to dance to something that you've never felt before," says Anthony Hamilton, whose love song catalog includes "So In Love" with fellow GRAMMY winner Jill Scott. "Great lyrics and the perfect vocal tone [are also] very important."

"The best love songs are something that someone hears and it instantly becomes theirs," Warren adds. "Listeners might have their own unique experience of why a certain song means something to them, but if it's meaningful enough it becomes a part of their own personal soundtrack. In a way, a love song is a canvas that you paint yourself onto, and when a truly great love song comes along, everybody feels they can paint themselves onto it. It becomes a part of everybody's inner life."

"It's writing about something that everybody can relate to but looking at it at a slightly different angle," says Shelly Peiken, a GRAMMY-nominated songwriter who has collaborated with Britney Spears, Keith Urban and Celine Dion, among others. "So when your audience hears it, they go, 'I know how that feels and I never thought about it that way.'"

Perhaps no one has had more experience playing personal soundtracks in public than disc jockey Art Laboe, who is currently in his 74th year as an on-air personality. His syndicated program, "The Art Laboe Connection," regularly mixes love songs from every decade since the '50s, and a long-time signature feature of Laboe's program has been the listener dedications he reads as song intros. Laboe agrees that the most powerful and popular love songs have always had a way of connecting with listeners in a uniquely intimate way. 

"The one thing that's been true through the decades that I've been on is that the great love songs feel personal to each listener," says Laboe. "I don't think there's any one way to make that happen, because musically and lyrically love songs can come from all sorts of directions. But with the ones that really work there's something in them that moves a person beyond the actual melody or the vocalist's performance or the quality of the production, and the big songs that really last continue to move people in that personal way."

As evidence of just how lasting a love song can be, Laboe cites the fact that he still receives weekly requests for "Earth Angel," a No. 1 hit for the doo-wop group the Penguins back in 1955. He points to a more contemporary artist — Swift — to explain how an artist's personal, musical expression can connect with the public at-large.

"She's a talented writer who can come up with something like 'You Belong With Me,'" says Laboe. "That song goes sailing out there and smacks right into the bulls-eye of what a lot of people are feeling, or have felt, or can relate to. Just about everybody — man or woman — has had the experience of looking at somebody else you're interested in and thinking what the song is saying. So Taylor Swift may have been writing about something very specific and personal to her, but she ended up with a song that millions and millions of people felt personally connected to in their own way."

"A very important ingredient in a love song is pain," adds GRAMMY winner Gillian Welch. "Because even when love is good and true, there's part of it that's painful."

Emotional considerations aside, the writing of a love song requires craft and technical skill. But Warren says her best work can't simply be summoned through craft alone — it comes when she feels as moved at the beginning of the creative process as a listener might be by the finished recording.

"On a technical level, every song is an individual and what works for one song might not work for another," she says. "Sometimes I'll start writing with a title in mind, or have some chords to work with. Sometimes I've got a basic concept for a song. But the main thing is that I have to feel something as I'm writing it. If I don't feel something, that song isn't going to be great. And if it seems like more of an exercise than a real expression of emotion, I'm probably not even going to finish writing it. But if I feel moved just getting to work on something, then there's a good chance it's going to move somebody else too."

Love songs — even the great ones — can become so familiar that it may be easy to underestimate their effect on both individuals and entire cultures. But at least one historian with a keen understanding of the evolution of love songs contends that their power to move, and the specific way they get people to move, should not be dismissed.

"What makes a love song great is what makes any song great — you have to feel it." — Diane Warren

"People are wrong to view these songs as mere entertainment or escapism," says Ted Gioia, author of Love Songs: The Hidden History. "The purpose of a successful love song is to create love. The first love songs were part of fertility rites and they aimed at changing the world, not just describing it. When the Beatles sang 'All You Need Is Love' or John Coltrane performed A Love Supreme, they wanted to transform the world in which they lived. And on a personal level, many of us would not be here today if our parents hadn't heard a love song at the right time and place. Those love songs aren't just life-changing, they are life-creating."

Catching Up On Music News By The Recording Academy Just Got Easier. Have A Google Home Device? "Talk To GRAMMYs"

(Chuck Crisafulli is an L.A.-based journalist and author whose most recent works include Go To Hell: A Heated History Of The Underworld, Me And A Guy Named Elvis, Elvis: My Best Man, and Running With The Champ: My Forty-Year Friendship With Muhammad Ali.)

Lin-Manuel Miranda (L) and host/creator Hrishikesh Hirway (R) in "Song Exploder"

Lin-Manuel Miranda (L) and host/creator Hrishikesh Hirway (R) in "Song Exploder"

Photo: Eric Veras/Netflix

News
How "Song Exploder" Unlocks The Intimacy Of Music song-exploder-netflix-hrishikesh-hirway-interview

Beat By Beat: How "Song Exploder" Unlocks The Intimacy Of Music And Creativity

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Based on the popular podcast, the newly launched Netflix series dissects classics and current hits one layer at a time, while host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway finds the human connection behind it all
John Ochoa
GRAMMYs
Oct 20, 2020 - 4:54 pm

Most people know "Song Exploder" as the popular podcast giving die-hard music fans a deep, inside look into the sonic mechanics behind their favorite tracks. A whole new class of music-heads now knows "Song Exploder" as the new Netflix series bringing the creativity behind music to the digital screen.

Originally launched as a podcast in 2014, "Song Exploder" dissects classic and current fan-favorite songs, with guest artists breaking down each individual track and element in detail to paint an intimate audio portrait of their art. The podcast, which has accumulated more than 60 million streams and downloads over the years and has hosted guests like U2, Selena Gomez, Björk, Fleetwood Mac, Solange and many others, now breathes new life as a Netflix docuseries. 

Introduced on the streaming platform at the beginning of October, "Song Exploder" adds an even deeper layer of storytelling and personal insight to the songs being deconstructed beat by beat. The show's inaugural four-episode run features Alicia Keys ("3 Hour Drive"), Lin-Manuel Miranda ("Wait For It" from "Hamilton"), R.E.M. ("Losing My Religion") and Ty Dolla $ign ("LA"). (Last week [Oct. 15], Netflix unveiled its next slate of guests for the show's second season, set to debut Dec. 15: Dua Lipa, The Killers, Nine Inch Nails and Natalia Lafourcade.

Whether in visual or podcast format, the core of "Song Exploder" remains the same: "an intimate portrait of an artist telling the story of how their artistic mind worked through creating one of their songs," host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway tells GRAMMY.com.

GRAMMY.com chatted with Hrishikesh Hirway about the human connection behind his new "Song Exploder" Netflix series and how he hopes the show will inspire others to create their own art.

You have an endless supply of songs from which to choose for any given "Song Exploder" episode, podcast and show. What needs to stand out in a song in order for you to develop it for "Song Exploder"?

The first step in the process is really identifying the artists before even getting to the song, because, frankly, I don't know necessarily which songs might have the best stories. The most famous songs don't necessarily have the most interesting stories, and the people who know that better than anyone are the people who made the songs.

But what I can try and determine is which artists seem really interesting and thoughtful, good storytellers, and who are also beloved by a lot of people. That's kind of where I start. And once I can get an artist onboard to talk about a song in this way, then I start the process of trying to narrow down which song it's going to be with them.

I feel like I don't know what the story [of the song] is all the time. There are a lot of songs that haven't necessarily been delved into, and frankly, I'm always interested in something like that ... where the backstory [of a song] hasn't been canonized and "Song Exploder" can be a place to tell it for the first time. So I really am relying on input from the artists ... The question that I ask them, frankly, is: Which of your songs do you feel the most emotional attachment to?

Ultimately, the most interesting stories, I think, when it comes to making songs or really making any kind of art, are about people and their feelings and the things that inspire them to make something at all. Even though the show is about music, it's also a portrait of each of these artists. In order to tell you something insightful, especially for it to be something that could be interesting to people who aren't people who make music themselves and also aren't necessarily even familiar with the artist or the song, it has to be something that connects to something in the human experience that feels significant.

I always try to make "Song Exploder" a show that reflected a broad range of genres and artists and backgrounds. So there's kind of almost a guarantee that you couldn't just get people hooked on the show based on who the artists were and what the songs were; I want everybody to watch every episode and listen to every episode of the podcast because I think that it's a worthwhile conversation to have. I think the creative process is something that's really fascinating in and of itself. It's an example of how people react to their own experience, to actually decide to make something based on their ideas, what they lived through, what they love ... The thing that I'm actually most interested in is that kind of emotional experience: the emotional attachment to the act of creating a piece of music.

Michael Stipe of R.E.M. in "Song Exploder"

Michael Stipe of R.E.M. in "Song Exploder" | Photo: Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix

There's a moment in the R.E.M. episode where frontman Michael Stipe gets almost emotional listening to his own voice on the band's classic, "Losing My Religion," and hearing the song elements broken down and presented to him in such an intimate manner, even after so many years since the song's release. How do you go about getting artists to open up to you and dive into their art so deeply?

I think one thing that helps is that I'm not really approaching [the interview process] head-on, certainly not right away. The questions don't start off front and center in like an emotionally investigative way. I think I have to earn their trust first, and part of that is from talking about the mechanics of the process first. That's the entry point in all these conversations. One of the reasons why having the [song's] stems is important, not just in terms of letting the listeners know what's going on in the song, but in terms of being able to facilitate that conversation with the artist.

Of all of the questions, the hardest one to answer is probably, "Why?" "Why did you decide to make the song this way? Why did you write this lyric? Why did you choose this chord progression?" That's the hardest [question], but it's also the one that I'm most interested in. But it's a little easier to start off with, first of all, "What?" "What are we listening to?" And then to ask them, "OK, how did you make it? And when did you make it?" All those basic factual questions are a way to just let them and me submerge ourselves into the memories of making that song.

Once they're there and able to relive some of the experience of it by hearing the actual evidence of the stuff that they did on that day—hearing their voice, hearing the instrument, hearing the actual track that they recorded around that time—it's a lot easier to ask them to then dig a few layers deeper and ask what was going on in their lives and how that might've fed into some of those creative decisions.

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You're now juggling the show and the podcast. How do you decide what songs go on the podcast format and what goes in video format?

Well, the podcast is a lot of work for a podcast, but that means that I'm still able to turn around an episode in a few weeks, whereas the TV show takes a much longer time to put together. There are just so many more components to it, and it's so much more work.

Part of the pitch for doing the television show is that I was trying to ask these artists to take a leap of faith, [like,] "This is something that's going to take a while to make, so you can't tie it to your promotional calendar, necessarily. I can't guarantee that it'll come out on such and such date to coincide with your single release or something like that." It was really more like, "Would you like to participate in this thing where there'll be this really meticulously crafted mini-documentary about this work that you did, and it's sort of evergreen."

That's a different pitch than with the podcast. Although with the podcast, I say all those things, too. I say it's evergreen and it's always better when it's not necessarily tied to your release schedule and more like when people have had a chance to live with the song a little bit. But one of the advantages of the podcast is it can be a little more nimble because it's a little easier to put together.

So this is a long way of saying that a lot of times that question is answered by the artists themselves or their publicists or managers, who are looking for a very specific outcome or timing, or they have something in mind, and that could be a matter of scale. It really depends on the circumstances of the artist and what works for them.

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Fans who've been following the podcast for a while will find a totally different experience when they come to the show. There are two types of storytelling when I hear "Song Exploder," the podcast, and when I watch "Song Exploder," the docuseries. The podcast is very audio-heavy: You get to really hear all of the isolated bits and pieces of the song. The show has a lot more historical and cultural context, sort of like a mini-documentary for a song, and you also hear from a lot more voices beyond just the recording artist. Beyond the visual element, what do you gain in terms of storytelling through the show?

I think one of the things that you mentioned is absolutely key to the TV show, which is that often on the podcast, it's just a single voice or maybe two voices together … But with the TV show, because the timeline was so different, there was a chance to stop and say, "OK, who do we really want? Who are all the voices that are involved in the creation of the song?" Maybe not just the artist, but also the collaborators that were essential to making the song. 

Having that kind of breadth and depth, it isn't always afforded to the shorter turnaround time and the scale of the podcast. But here, to really immerse the audience and give a really full picture of what the song was, having those other voices in there was really important. For [the] Alicia Keys episode [about the song "3 Hour Drive,"] we traveled to London to film with [the song's guest vocalist and co-writer/co-producer] Sampha and the [song's] co-writer/co-producer Jimmy Napes because we knew that they were going to only expand and flesh out the story.

I think a part of it is also a matter of craft, too. When you're working in audio, you're kind of only working in one dimension, which is time. You're just relying on one sense, hearing, and you're just basing everything on how long things take; the rhythm comes from just that one sense. But with TV, you have to also give a rhythm and complexity visually, too. You can't just transliterate the podcast into a TV format, where it's just one person talking, mixed with the isolated stems, because it wouldn't work; it would get very boring very quickly. So in order to have that kind of texture and nuance, we wanted to involve all those different people and try and give a little bit bigger of a picture than maybe what comes out in the podcast.

Do you see the podcast and the show as separate entities or related in the same family? Do you need to engage with both formats to fully appreciate or understand what "Song Exploder" is trying to do?

Oh, I don't think you have to engage with both. Of course, I would love it if people did, just because they're both things that I've put a lot of work into, and you want people to enjoy the stuff that you've worked on. This is not a great analogy, but I think it's sort of like reading a book or watching a movie that's been adapted of that book. I don't think you need to read the book to enjoy the movie, and vice versa, you don't need to have seen the movie to have full enjoyment of the book. But maybe you'll get something out of the experience of taking both in. Maybe it changes the way you feel about both.

This is, of course, a little bit different, because it's not even the same story that's being told. It's really just taking the core concept, which is an intimate portrait of an artist telling the story of how their artistic mind worked through creating one of their songs, and taking that concept and expressing it in these two different media. So it's much looser even than something like an adaptation of a book to a movie.

What artist or what song is your holy grail for the podcast or the show or both?

I don't have one holy grail—I think I probably have about a thousand. Anytime I start listening to music, I start wondering about it. That's not new since I started "Song Exploder"; it's the other way around. That's always been the way I listen to music. When I fall in love with a song, I want to hear it from the inside out. I want to hear what the individual tracks, what the individual stems sound like. I want to know what the ideas were that inspired all of these things that I'm falling in love with. "Song Exploder" was just a way of me being able to actually make that happen for myself. So anytime I'm listening to music and I hear something great, you could put it on the list.

Ty Dolla $ign in "Song Exploder"

Ty Dolla $ign in "Song Exploder" | Photo: Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix

What is your ultimate goal with "Song Exploder"?

I wish people would either watch the show or listen to the podcast and come away with a feeling that they want to make something themselves. Part of my aim with the show is to democratize the act of creation a little bit. I think it's easy to look at very successful artists or very successful songs or any kind of art in any format, where it has reached a certain level of success, and think that there's some uncrossable boundary for everyday people that keeps them from making something as great as those songs …

I think the best feeling that I always get from finishing working on an episode is something akin to that. That like, I just want to go make something, and it doesn't just have to be music. I think that anybody who is interested in making anything at all, to get something from the show, just the idea of going from nothing but an idea and following that all the way through to a finished piece of art, I hope that might be inspiring to everyone.

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