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.
This episode contains explicit language.
Moses Sumney is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles.
His first album, Aromanticism, came out in September 2017.
But before that, he'd already worked with an impressive and diverse list of collaborators,
from Sifion Stevens to Solange to Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Skrillex.
That spirit continues with the song Moses takes apart in this episode.
It has contributions from producers Cam OB and Paris Strother and legendary bassist Thundercat.
Here's Moses Sumney breaking down his song Choral.
My name is Moses Sumney.
When I was making my album, I was looking for a manager at the time.
And one of the managers I was meeting was suggested like, oh,
you know, you should get in the studio with this guy, Cam Obie.
And I was super reluctant to do it
because it's such an L.A. thing for like songwriters to go to sessions with random producers or other songwriters.
But I hated that.
Cam's a brilliant producer.
But most of the stuff he's done has been either hip-hop stuff or R&B stuff.