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.
In this episode, Alfred Darlington,
who's better known as Daedalus, takes apart his song, Experience.
This early track of his is made with only acoustic sounds,
but Alfred still considers this a piece of electronic music.
My name is Alfred Darlington, and I record under the name Daedalus.
We are going to get into the song Experience,
which comes from my debut record, Invention, from 2002.
It is a melody that was haunting me throughout my college career.
That was at USC, the Thornton School of Music, where I was studying jazz bass.
It's hard to describe necessarily how a melody comes to us.
For me, it just was out of the blue.
i don't come from a background in keyboards and the song came out of just fidgeting literally sitting around in
like i think it was a piano 101 class trying to figure out how to play and this strange little rolling melody came out it haunted me for years and then finally with my first record i knew i had a chance to express something okay so the intro is an example of fisher price plastic record player but i'm playing it wrong i'm not using a plastic record on the player i'm actually playing the stylus of the Fisher-Price plastic record player.
It's like a music box.
On one of those players, there's kind of no wrong notes.
It's just a scale.
So I'm plucking the tines that would normally be hit by the pips on the plastic record.