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.

This episode contains explicit language.

Big Boy is a rapper from Atlanta. When he was a teenager, he and Andre 3000 formed Outcast and went on to sell over 25 million records and win six Grammys.

He's released three solo albums, including Boomaverse, which came out in 2017.

In this episode, Big Boy breaks down a song from that album called Order of Operations.

My name is Big Boy, aka Daddy Fat Sacks.

AKA Sir Lucius L. Lelfoot, the L stands for Laven the Cut of Ladies, like to put lip gloss on my lapel.

That's my name. During the course of me recording Boomaverse, I would break up my recording sessions between Stank Onya, my studio, and I would record at a studio in LA as well.

So this happened to be one of my trips to LA. I would have producers come in and that first day was the producer Scott Storch, who I worked with on Shuttlebug.

Shuttlebug was Big Boy's debut single as a solo artist. It was nominated for a Grammy and named by Rolling Stone as one of the best singles of 2010.

This was our first time reconnecting since we did Shuttlebug.

I wanted a real raw rough rap song that had simple melody in it and that was just kind of driving.

And he kind of tell him makes the beats to fit the artist. So we got in the studio and we were cooking it up from scratch.

My name is Scott Storch. The very first thing that I did to start this beat was the guitar part.

Oftentimes I'll layer different instruments playing the same part. Slightly slightly different feel on it to make it have a certain human feel to it.

And this particular instance I used the keys.

So that's just creating that little gel around the guitar.

I love the way the melodies rolled in the song. The emotion came from the keys that do do do do do do do do do do do do do do.

That was like the driving force of the melody to me.

We like to have a contrast from this like smooth part that's played on the keys and on the guitar with some good tempo and dirty 808s.

That's my boy Diego Av. On the 808 he does co-production work with me.

And then I programmed some drums.

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