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.
Rastan Bhatmanglij is a songwriter, producer,
and composer who first rose to prominence in 2006 as one of the members of Vampire Weekend.
He's produced songs for Frank Ocean, Solange, Carly Rae Jepsen, and more.
But his September 2017 album, Half Light, is his first as a solo artist.
In this episode, Rostam breaks down his song, Bike Dream, and coming up,
he explains how it was influenced in part by bands like T-Rex and Coldplay.
But Bike Dream began very differently from how it ended up.
Here's Rostam on how the song started.
Before there were any lyrics or any vocal melodies,
there was a beat and a song title, a beat that I named Bike Dream.
It must have been around 2007.
I had just graduated from college, I think, and I was on my bike a lot.
I remember writing the verses to this song in this apartment that I lived in in Brooklyn Heights,
and I had a couple roommates, and they all worked.
And I was mostly on tour, but when I wasn't on tour, I had the whole apartment to myself.
And I would go into my friend Tim's room because his room had a huge window that faced the garden.
And I would just go in there to get a sort of change of scenery.