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.
Between 2004 and 2012, the band Grizzly Bear put out four critically acclaimed albums.
Their newest album is called Painted Ruins, and it features this song, Four Cypresses.
And in this episode, two of the members of the band,
Chris Taylor and Daniel Rawson, tell the story of how the song came together.
This is Daniel Rawson.
My name's Chris Taylor.
And there's Ed Droste.
And there's Chris Baer, who plays drums.
He plays a lot of things.
We like to play a lot of different instruments.
None of us really like to get stuck in one corner.
Chris Bear was up in my place upstate,
and we were trying this approach where he would just put down a bunch of different drum feels,
kind of improvising different drum feels over the same progression.
He played this like rollicking drum groove that almost felt like it was very disorienting,
and we didn't really, you couldn't almost feel where one was in the beat.
It was just kind of like... this rolling, strange thing.