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 Hirwe.
This episode contains explicit language.
That was from an interview with Belgian filmmakers, the Dardan Brothers,
talking about the kinds of stories they tell, saying, human suffering, that interests us very much.
It also interests Tom Krell, a songwriter and producer who goes by the name How to Dress Well.
After seeing one of the Dardan Brothers films, The Kid with the Bike,
he was inspired to make the song Poor Cyril.
In this episode, he'll dig deep into where that inspiration led him,
from transformations within the song, within the film, and within himself.
Now,
here's How to Dress Well from an interview recorded live at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco.
My name's Tom, and I play music as How to Dress Well.
The backbone of the song is a sample of a Beethoven concerto.
It's sampled from a film, The Kid with a Bike, by the Darden brothers.
They used the music in the film to signal chapter changes.
This boy, Cyril, he is living in a foster care contemporary orphanage,
for no no real kind of rational calculation decides to take him and bring him into her life and try and give him a love which would remedy the wounding he's sort of living out as a young boy he's been abandoned by his family and has become quite violent and then the movie is is quite simple it's just what unfolds when this woman tries to do this quite courageous moral thing for this already quite damaged child people are forced to do either morally courageous things to try and help him or morally compromising things when they're exposed to what happens when we live in a world with abandoned children.
The film just blasted me.