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.
Dave Hill is a comedian and frontman of the band Valley Lodge.
In this episode, Dave will deconstruct the Valley Lodge song Go,
which you might recognize as the opening credits of the HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
I'm Dave Hill, and I have a rock band called Valley Lodge.
We're a power pop band, which is like, you know,
it's a misnomer because power pop is neither powerful nor popular.
It's all like guys who, you know, when they're in their 20s,
done like sort of more like touring and had albums and videos and things like that.
So this was sort of the band that I sort of liken it to like, oh, this is like our softball team.
We're not going to stop rocking, but like we're playing to like 15 friends.
But the one thing I was like, I hope it would be cool if we could tour Japan.
That was my one thought in my head.
But I made zero effort to make that happen.
But one day I got an email saying like, hey, we have this Japanese label.
you know we love your record you know we want to put it out over here and see
if you guys want a tour over here the lonely planet guide to japan has all these phrase japanese phrases stuff for every situation when we did the tour you know we'd drive from city to city in this van and i would sit in the back and try to learn phrases and
if the tour manager just two Japanese guys that were taking us around.