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.
Will Butler is a member of the band Arcade Fire.
He also co-wrote the score for the film Her, which earned him an Oscar nomination.
In March 2015, he put out his first solo album,
and in this episode, he breaks down the song Anna from that record.
This came out of a nonsense song I was singing about my son, whose name is Alvin.
I always have my phone, so I just made an iPhone memo of it.
The record I recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York,
the very top was Hendrix's old apartment, and it's like recording a record in your house.
It's just carpets and a piano and couches and a record player and vinyl on the walls and like a psychedelic wall painting.
So I booked a week, and the first four days I had Jeremy Guerra there playing drums.
I had six songs, and we'd done all of them.
And then I had Jeremy for another day, so I was like, oh, we should do another song.
What of these voice memos should be a song?
And that one came up, and I was like, oh,
yeah, just do that over and over, that melody over and over.
And I said, just play drums like this, boom-cha, boom-cha, for, let's say, four minutes.
We did two takes, once slightly slower than the record,