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Rule 5: RHYTHM
~ by Hrishikesh Hirway






Hrishikesh Hirway is a musician, a composer and the founder and producer of the podcast Song Exploder in which musicians take apart their songs piece by piece, and tell the story of how they were made. He also co-hosts The West Wing Weekly which dissects every episode of the award-winning White House drama.
The musical part of a story is, at some level, universally understood. You don't even have to speak the same language as someone, but if you hear their music you can still get something from it, feel some emotion, or get some understanding. So if in Song Exploder an artist is talking about something that's technically a little bit ahead of you, you’re still gonna end up getting it because by the time the music that goes along with it comes in, it's in a land that will make sense on some level.

I think of it like food, actually. You get deep into the dish and it's like, wow, what a delicious thing, and I can tell that it's complicated and it's really good. But it's not the same as when you individually try all the different ingredients that went into it. Tasting them individually, you can’t tell what those ingredients actually do to the thing overall. But then as you eat the finished dish, you can taste that there's some magic that happens once you put them all together – how they interact, how pushing one ingredient changes it this way, pushing another changes it that way.

The real heavy stroke is this, and what I love, the thing that I have done throughout my whole life: when there's something in the song that I really love, I will try and get my friends to pay attention to it. I'll be like, “Did you hear that little sound?” Turning up the volume, getting everybody to lean in and look into the thing.

Simplicity is something I'm always trying to forge. How do you hammer out this to be a flat sheet of metal so that you can just understand what's going on? Cause a song is complicated and nuanced and detailed and – I don't know – self-contradicting. I'm trying to do as little as I can to adorn the thing because if I can present it in a way that feels matter-of-fact and kind of minimalist, then you can kind of absorb the thing a lot more. You can pay a lot more attention to it. It's like an art gallery kind of format. Song Exploder is supposed to be a white room with white walls and high ceilings.

I really think of this exchange between the seeker and the music as being the real taste of the show. I want it to feel like there is momentum. There's a really simple promise in an episode, which is: you're going to hear how the song is made and then you hear the song. Hearing the song is the ultimate fulfillment of this process of the story, and I'm always trying to move one step closer to that with each piece. So I'm introducing the layers of the song and the different layers of the idea that went into it.

It's easy to follow chronology: I did this, and then I did this, and then I did this. The "and then I" part of it feels like a rhythm that's building towards something. It takes the listener on a journey of how this song was made. But rhythm in general – in storytelling, in living your life – is the same, really. It moves us along.

Interview and edit by Erin Ruffin
Illustrations by Melissa Jarram