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 Hopkins is a composer and electronic music producer who's been nominated twice for the UK's Mercury Prize.
In addition to making his own music,
he co-produced Coldplay's Grammy Award-winning album Viva La Vida with his frequent collaborator Brian Eno.
In May 2018, John Hopkins released his fifth album, Singularity.
It was named Best New Music by Pitchfork.
In this episode, John Hopkins takes apart the song Luminous Beings,
which was inspired in part by the meditative effects of psilocybin,
the compound found in psychedelic mushrooms.
He also details less magical moments where he hated the music he was making and had to destroy it as part of the creative process.
Hi, I'm John Hopkins.
When I started writing this track, I was living in California.
I'd written maybe six or seven albums, including the film scores and collaborations,
all in the same little studio in East London.
And I really couldn't face the idea of starting what I knew was going to be my biggest project yet in the same room.
And, you know, I'd been having quite a lot of trouble sleeping around then.
It's very common amongst musicians to experience this, like, you know, you've got...
very late shows, lots of them, and you've got flights and time zone changes and all these things.