You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
My name is Tao Nguyen.
Melina Duterte goes by the name J-Song.
She's a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist.
She's released three albums as J-Song and has produced, engineered, and mixed each one.
Her third album, Unukko, came out in August 2019.
And in this episode, Melina breaks down a song from it called Tenderness.
I'm Melina from Jsom.
I started writing Tenderness summer of 2018.
I just moved to LA and I was doing a lot of like production work for other people.
This artist came over to like work with me for her whole record and there was one day where I had to clean her entire hard drive and I noticed that there was a folder that said vintage drum machines and I just like copy and pasted it onto my computer
because I was like,
oh, it's right there.
She doesn't know that, but it's okay.
And I just like experimented with all of those.
I started off by recording this Lynn LM1 drum machine.
That's like the Prince drum sampler.
And I know he used that on like all the hits.
And at the time, I was listening to a lot of Steely Dan.