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.

Blood Orange is the project of songwriter and producer Devante Heinz. He's produced and co-written songs for artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, Salange, Heim, Asap Rocky, and others.

He's been releasing his own music as Blood Orange since 2011. In August 2018, he put out his fourth Blood Orange album, Negro Swan.

And then this episode, Dev breaks down how he made the song St. You'll hear the original version of the track from 2015, as well as the layers and voices that were added over years to create the final version that appears on the album.

My name is Devante Heinz. I tend not to remember the first time I stopped tracks, but this song, I remember the very beginning of it.

I just didn't remember it because I'd only just moved into the place I was living in. And obviously before taking care of anything that a human needs to survive, I set up music equipment in the middle.

I was really into these kind of messy beats that just have almost like sunny melodies over the top. Like, let's go swimming after Russell.

You always don't even realize how pectic the drum track is because the melody is so sweet.

I wanted something along those lines. So I was in my apartment and a lot of the times, I used sounds and things I find from YouTube.

And I cut them up and will replay them. And so I found like a loop on YouTube.

I'm pretty sure that was a YouTube loop because I remember the cable system to run it for the mixer was like a little tax in at first.

And at that time, I was running a lot of things through this mixer that I had. It's like a radio shack made mixer from back in the day. And it's probably for like live DJs. And there's a lot of like effects on it.

So I found that loop and then had a drum machine.

It was just me playing along with it. And then I added the A to 8 to them to it.

I ran everything through that mixer and then into my computer.

And then I added the vocals and I added the chords to that.

And then I added the vocals to that.

Same thing on my left view. That was first line I wrote. Then after that, the second line I wrote was I wish I'd seen the same you were before.

And then everything else stemmed from that.

So the song is kind of like a hopeful song about seeing the best in people and the best in yourself.

And it's really it's really like a very simple concept. And now it's all that existed for half a year. It was just that beat for maybe like seven minutes and that melody over the top of it.

I used to have people hanging at my studio because just working solo, I do miss the kinsman ship over the band.

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