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.
Before the books broke up, they released three albums that combined composed music and found sounds.
In this episode,
Nick Samuto explains how he crafted the song Smells Like Content off of their 2005 album Lost and Safe from unlikely sources like geometry,
chance encounters, and a corrugated PVC pipe.
My name is Nick Cimuto, and I was one half of the books.
The other half is Paul Dion.
I did sort of the writing and compositional side mostly,
although the roles were kind of loosely defined.
In the case of this track, I did everything in my little apartment in North Adams, Massachusetts.
The way I would work on books tracks...
was to put together a body of related sounds without worrying so much about the composition of it until much later.
So I had a pile of sounds going, which basically became the sound world of this track.
I remember I used to get records out from the public library when I was a kid,
and whenever the record would end, I would just wait for that sound because I loved it so much.
That kind of little thump as it crossed over where the spiral turns into a circle.
Yeah, that circle at the center of a record is a loop,