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.
RJD2's been making music since 2002.
His song A Beautiful Mind was turned into the opening credits for Mad Men.
He's a producer and beatmaker, but also a singer and songwriter.
For the vocals on the song Games You Can Win,
he tapped Kenna, a Grammy nominee who Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blink.
Coming up,
you'll get to hear the demo vocals that RJ originally recorded himself and sent to Kenna as a guide.
They've never been released.
Here's Games You Can Win on Song Exploder.
My name is RJ Krohn.
I make records under the moniker RJD2.
The first thing that came to mind when I pulled up this session and I started thinking about it was the drum pattern.
That's a recording of me playing in a basement.
It was a pattern that I would play a lot to practice, you know, practicing drums.
The verses, they only have the hi-hat on the...
one two three four of the bar it's a very simple basic hi-hat pattern and i know exactly where it came from
because there's this drum break that pete rock used the song is called soul brother number one the hi-hat is just doing straight quarter notes and everything kind of rotates around that so for whatever reason it's stuck in my head and so i know that that drum pattern was to some degree a nod to that drum break.