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.
Slow Dive formed in 1989 in Reading, England.
They put out three albums between 1991 and 1995, and their sound helped define the shoegaze genre.
In 2017, the band released a critically acclaimed self-titled album.
Their first in over 20 years.
And in this episode,
singer and guitarist Neil Halstead takes apart the Slow Dive song, Sugar for the Pill.
I'm Neil Halstead from the band Slow Dive.
We live by the coast, a place called Newquay in Cornwall, down by the sea.
And we have a lot of seagulls around here.
This song, it has elements of where I live.
And the first line, there's a blizzard of gulls.
drumming in the wind.
It's inspired by walking around the coastline here and the very noisy seagulls we have.
The song originated from this sort of ascending guitar motif.
I was just playing it on an acoustic guitar.
I started playing it in some soundchecks and then I added a delay onto it.
A lot of the songs start that way.