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.
Julia Holter studied composition, and in the song Horns Surrounding Me,
she arranges not only acoustic and electronic instruments,
but also layers of ambient field recordings and background noise.
The song was released in 2013 on her acclaimed album Loud City Song.
In this episode,
Julia deconstructs the recording and talks about what she did to evoke a feeling of fear in both the music and the way she sang,
changing her voice on different parts of the song to create character and texture.
My name is Julia Holter.
I wrote Horn Surrounding Me in 2010.
It was sort of like a soft piano song that I used these lyrics that I found.
It wasn't my writing.
It was Pushkin.
We played this song.
that had no name for like a year and a half live.
And it had these other lyrics, but then I decided to put my own lyrics to it.
And that was what Horn Surrounding Me became.
This song is about being kind of bombarded by noise and sound and like needing to find one's own inner peace,