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.
The band Dropkick Murphys formed in Boston in 1996.
For over 20 years, they've made music that's reflected the culture and community they've come from.
In January 2017, they released the album 11 Short Stories of Pain and Glory.
In this episode, guitarist Tim Brennan breaks down how the music for Blood was made.
and Ken Casey explains the inspiration behind the lyrics.
This is Tim Brennan from the Dropkick Murphys.
I play guitar and accordion.
Over the course of the last few albums, our songs started getting played in Fenway Park,
and the song that the band wrote about the Bruins would get played in Boston Garden during a hockey game.
And without fail, every time it would come on,
We would turn to each other and go, why does it sound terrible?
You know, like, and then you hear an ACDC song come on.
You're like, man, that sounds phenomenal.
And our thing just sounds weird and muddled.
But then we became friends and luckily colleagues with our now producer, Ted Hutt.
who explained to us that space is pretty vital when it comes to things sounding huge and in a situation like that.
You know, we were used to coming up with these sort of raucous punk songs.