This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

A Rishikesh her way has a podcast called Song Exploder. The concept is simple but brilliant.

I ask musicians to take apart one of their songs and go through it piece by piece and let

listeners hear what's going on inside some of the tracks and reveal the secrets of what went into

making the song, whether it's some of the sounds inside of it or just the memories of what they

were going through when they were creating the song.

I don't think Rishikesh would mind me saying but it's kind of a design show about music.

I'm 99% Invisible for Songs.

On the very first episode of Song Exploder, Rishikesh interviewed Jimmy Temberello of the band

The Postal Service and invited him to take a deep dive into each individual element of the song.

The district sleeps alone tonight. It's the song that's playing behind me now. If you don't already

own the long Postal Service album, you've made some poor choices in life. I'm serious.

Anyway, this is Jimmy Temberello isolating the backing vocal track,

sung by Jenny Lewis. So here's some of Jenny's background vocals so I'll load out.

So Temberello was looking to add more texture to the final mix of the song and he had these

beautiful backing vocals. It might have been just an accident with a delay pedal but I've

looped a little bit of Jenny's vocals and made it into texture in the song. I was one of the

last things that we put into that into the district. We can play that part by itself.

This vocal loop comes in after the second verse when it's kind of going into the more dancey outro part.

Here's who was the case her way from the song Exploder again. I'd heard that song the district

sleeps alone tonight. I mean so many times since it came out in 2003 and I knew that part and I

knew that sound. I had no idea that that was a human voice making that sound until he took everything

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