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 Herway.

Amy Mann is a Grammy and Oscar nominated singer-songwriter. In the 80s, she fronted the band Till Tuesday and in 1993, she released her first solo album.

In 2017, Amy released her ninth album, Mental Illness. And in this episode, she tells the story of how the song Patient Zero, from that album, was made.

I talked to Amy along with the song's co-writer, Jonathan Colton. The interview was recorded in front of a live audience, onboard the Joco Cruise, a music and comedy cruise organized by Jonathan Colton.

Here's Amy Mann on Song Exploder.

My name is Amy Mann. This song was originally written, were inspired by meeting the actor Andrew Garfield at a party.

I had seen him on social network. I was a big fan of social network and I thought he was really great. And my husband was with me and said, we met and we were very excited to meet him.

And we were talking and it was one of these big Hollywood parties. This is before Spider-Man. So he had just sort of landed in Los Angeles and was completely freaked out by being around super famous people and huge amounts of money and studios.

Like just the whole thing seemed to be not his thing at all. And so that kind of gave me the idea for a story about someone who comes to Hollywood, a real artist with the promise that they're going to be in a big movie and then kind of gets chewed up and spit out by more corrupt influences.

This is the crummy voice memo on my iPhone.

I wrote it as a Waltz. It was in 3-4 time. You know, I love writing Waltz on a acoustic guitar. So it came really easily for me.

But it also, because it was so much my bag, acoustic guitar, Waltz time, that it was not that exciting to me.

I thought it could be something, but I just didn't have any sense of perspective about it. And so, you know, I was kind of at the point where I knew that I had run out of ideas for it and thought, well, I'll just hand it to somebody else.

For me, this record, I wanted it to be very soft and acoustic and depressing and melancholy. And I thought I should have Jonathan, of course.

I am all of those things. Sing is a sad, soft 70s style vocals.

I take that as a compliment. My name is Jonathan Colton and I co-wrote this song with Amy. Amy sent me that voice memo and I listened to it on the computer in my office and she had said, this song is dead to me, I can't make it go.

And you can do whatever you want. You can really record. I don't care.

It's a little bit, I can't lose situation because if you come up with something then great. And if you don't, then it was a piece of garbage. I was never going to use.

When you're taking somebody else's song and trying to change it, what you don't want to do is learn it too well because you will get stuck in the same rut that they're in.

So, I like to listen to it a couple of times just to get it.

And then let it unfold the way it wants to unfold.

And then let it unfold over the trance. The villain ended up with a heart.

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