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.
My name is Ruben Nielsen.
I play guitar and sing in a band called Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
If you have like different relationships,
say if you have a bunch of people that you fall in love with in your life,
and then you start to wonder whether you're continuously in love with the same part of different people,
that's to me is what.
Multilove is about.
Multilove is the title track from the 2015 album by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
In this episode, Ruben Nielsen tells the story of how he made the song,
with help from his brother Cody Nielsen,
and how it was influenced by Romeo and Juliet, Questlove, and a broken synthesizer.
That song, my brother had a lot to do with because he was playing this chord progression.
I just started singing over what he was doing, just kind of ad-libbing.
I have this Baldwin piano in the basement and so he just played that and I just walked around in circles ad-libbing for like two or three hours.
You know, I just put a mic up and I just recorded.
what I was ad-libbing and then we sifted through it later and then we went and we did it again and then we sifted through again.
Because I found that the longer he played the chord progression over and over again,