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.
Amy Mann is a Grammy and Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter.
In the 80s, she fronted the band Till Tuesday, and in 1993, she released her first solo album.
In 2017, Amy released her ninth album, Mental Illness, and in this episode,
she tells the story of how the song Patient Zero from that album was made.
I talked to Amy along with the song's co-writer, Jonathan Coulton.
The interview was recorded in front of a live audience on board the JoCo Cruise,
a music and comedy cruise organized by Jonathan Coulton.
Here's Amy Mann on Song Exploder.
My name is Amy Mann.
This song was originally written or inspired by meeting the actor Andrew Garfield at a party.
I had seen him in Social Network.
I was a big fan of Social Network, and I thought he was really great.
And my husband was with me, and so we met, and we were very excited to meet him.
And we were talking, and it was one of these big Hollywood parties.
This was before Spider-Man, so he...
had just sort of landed in Los Angeles and was completely freaked out by being around super famous people and huge amounts of money and studios.
Like, just the whole thing seemed to be not his thing at all.