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.
Grimes is the project of Claire Boucher.
In 2015, she released Art Angels, her fourth album.
In this episode,
she breaks down Kill V. Mame and how the experience of writing songs for other artists opened up the way that she writes for herself.
This is Claire Boucher from Grimes.
I was like jamming with a friend and this person was really good at making really aggressive music and he kept doing these cute little plucky things and I was like,
no, no, let's make a hard song.
He was like, no, no, you make cute music.
I was like, like I was so horrified.
Like I was like, I can make hard music.
So I went home after that and sort of wanting to prove that I could make a, I don't know,
something that's going to be really aggressive that
like I would want to play during an action sequence in a movie or something.
So that was kind of the impetus of how it started.
So the first thing I made for the song was I just got out this old crappy guitar I had and I didn't know any chords.
I hadn't really played guitar very much.
It's like a single note guitar lead thing.