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.

Singer, songwriter, Andrew Day put out her first record in August 2015.

Since then, she's been invited by the Obama's to perform at the White House on multiple occasions,

and her record was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B album.

In this episode, Andrew breaks down her song forever mine, along with the tracks producer Rob Kleiner.

I am Andrew Day, and I co-wrote forever mine.

I'm Rob Kleiner. I co-wrote and produced the song with Andrew.

Even before I had learned that I might be able to co-write with Andrew, there was this cool buzz going on.

She had just signed a Warner, and she was doing some showcases, and I was like,

I hope I get to work with her. And then lucky enough, it happened.

Yeah, they put us together for a reason. It sounded like a great musical fit.

A lot of the work I had done before that was like soul-inspired and a little bit of hip-hop.

Yeah, it was sort of the mix of the one thing I wanted was the mix of the old and the new.

So it was kind of like, all right, cool, let's do this. I told Rob, I'm like, I love the flamingos, and I love the song. I only have eyes for you.

And so that was really sort of the prototype for the song. It sounds like I only have eyes for you, but I want it current.

I want it with a little bit of hip-hop.

If you break down the flamingos track, it's this 50s-do-up thing, which has a lot of similarities to a lot of 50-do-up songs, especially that triplet piano.

And that's a cool thing that you don't really hear a lot in modern music, so it's like, well, I got to do something like that.

The piano happens to be a midi piano. One thing you get good at being a bedroom producer is making

MIDI stuff sound real, and especially when you're going for a cool vintage sound like that.

Yeah.

...