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 Rishi Kesh Hirwe.

My name is Bjerk, and I'm here to talk about Stone Milker on my album, Vulnikura.

In January 2015, Bjork released Vulnikaura.

She described it as a complete heartbreak album.

And in November, she released Vulnukura Strings, a companion album that stripped away

the electronics.

In this episode, Bjork breaks down the making of both the original version of Stone Milker

as well as the strings version.

She traces her writing and recording process for the track and her reasons for wanting to make a second version.

It's about someone who's trying to get emotions out of another person.

The whole song is emotionally about wanting clarity, wanting simplicity, and talking to someone

who wants things to be really complex and foggy and unclear, you're saying okay i've got clarity so you know

wanted or not so it's like sort of celebrating simplicity and clarity i was walking on a beach and i was kind of walking back and forth and the lyrics kind of came along kind of without me really editing them.

The strength of this album really is just simplicity and, you know, this kind of like thinking out loud feeling.

And I shouldn't be too clever.

It would work against it.

So I kind of just went with the first words that actually came.

Moments of clarity are so rare i better document this probably the most obvious lyrics i've ever written i actually wrote a whole

another lyric to the song which was really maybe a bit too clever for its own good

but something in me just said no don't touch it

it has to be like almost clumsy or naive

...