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 Rishikesh Hirway.
I've always loved writing with other people,
and my first experiences of songwriting were with my best friend Andrew from school.
We both started playing guitar about the same time.
And we were both obsessed with the Beatles.
We had one of these books, you know, these kind of like how to play the Beatles chords books.
And we just couldn't do it.
Like we learned the chords, but they just didn't sound right.
And years later, like it's funny, I was in my girlfriend's flat.
She had the same book and I picked it up.
I was like, no way this is the book that me and Andrew tried to learn the guitar from.
And when I started playing along with her, I was like, no way.
these chords are all wrong and I was like all these years later like as somebody who like knows the guitar a little bit better than when I was like 14 or whatever I was like no way that's why we couldn't learn these songs
because the chords are actually wrong but I have so much to thank that book for because
because the songs didn't sound right when we played them Andrew and I we both said like let's just make our own songs up with the chords that we know and that's how I started writing songs is
because if we wrote our own songs Nobody was going to tell us that they didn't sound how they were supposed to sound
because it was us who dictated how they were supposed to sound.
I am Alex Kapranos of the band Franz Ferdinand.