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.

Arcade Flyer is a Grammy winning 6-piece band originally from Montreal. They've released five albums and the last three have all debuted at number one on the charts.

In this episode, singer Wind Butler takes apart, put your money on me from their 2017 album, Everything Now.

The story of the song began when Wind and his wife and bandmate Rishikesh's song moved to New Orleans.

I'm Wind Butler. I play Arcade Fire.

We built a new studio in New Orleans, which I've kind of begun to recognize as part of the process of making a record.

We always end up kind of putting a new studio together and somehow in making the space, there's this kind of period where you're just plugging things in and seeing how they work and you accidentally end up writing a bunch of music.

And so the beginning of the song was around when I first got an 808 drum machine and was just kind of plugging it in and just got really excited about how it was sounding.

We did a tour where we played these small venues and played all new material and then I would usually DJ after and I just had so much fun.

But the thing that was really interesting was I found it really forced me to listen to a lot more music and then listen to it really loud and really big PA, which is something I wasn't doing in my day to day life.

Like sexual helium, the first time I heard that in a real club system, it was like, what? That's what that sounds like.

But I get that feeling, I won't be second to home, I need my sense of sexual.

Feeling, I'll be.

There's a little bit of a guitar but the backing track is just an 808 drum machine.

The drums on that song sound so good and so I was realizing that you could do that with that instrument.

We have this synth called the CS80 which is just a beautiful, archaic piece of hardware.

It's most famous for the Blade Runner soundtrack. You can hear it in the demo.

I was just kind of playing the bass loop on one hand and then there's this high kind of like, do do do do do sound.

That I was making just by pulling the slider, like adding harmonics to the bass line.

So it was all basically just one track.

It's a beautiful sound but it's really out of tune if you ever try to add any other instruments.

Like if it's by itself, it's perfect and then it just was like, well, I guess no other instruments can be in this song.

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