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.
This episode contains explicit language.
Andrew Bird is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist,
maybe best known for his violin playing and his whistling.
In this episode, Andrew breaks down his song Roma Fade from the 2016 album Are You Serious?
This interview was recorded on a rainy Friday in Los Angeles.
I'm Andrew Bird.
Okay, so it started off like you hear in the intro.
a loop that I made in my living room.
It's just me playing this loop and whistling.
It's supposed to be two different instruments creating this composite melody.
The first couple lines came as I was driving down I-5 from San Francisco with my family, and I was,
long drives like that, you gotta entertain yourself, so I figured I'd work on a song.
I was looking out over this sort of barren stretch of the Central Valley,
and there were some rainstorms kind of in the distance and light passing through the clouds.
There was this patch of light coming down, and I said, light, rains.
It sounds like a weather report, like light rains today, like it is at the moment.
But I was also singing light rains as in rules.