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.
John Batiste is a pianist, songwriter, and composer from New Orleans.
He's been nominated for multiple Grammys,
and he just won the Golden Globe and got an Oscar nomination for the soundtrack to the Pixar film Soul,
which he composed along with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
John is also a recipient of the American Jazz Museum's Lifetime Achievement Award.
And on weeknights, you can see him as the band leader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
In March 2021, he put out his new album, We Are.
But the title track from it actually came out much earlier, in June 2020.
We put the song out during the Black Lives Matter protest before it was even finished being mixed and mastered.
In this episode...
John talks about how he drew from his roots,
both at a personal level and at a cultural level, and wove all of it into the song.
I'm John Baptiste.
So I started working on this song in September of 2019 with Kizzo.
a great producer from the Netherlands, and Autumn Rowe.
We met up in New York City, and this is pre-COVID.
My life is busy.