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.

Chet Faker is the stage name of Australian singer and songwriter Nick Murphy. His debut album, Built-on Glass, won five ARIA awards, Australia's version of the Grammys, including Best Male Artist, producer of the year, and best independent album. In this episode, Nick breaks down the song gold and traces the journey it took from a dream to a cover to a love song.

This is Nick Murphy, I write record and produce under the name Chet Faker. The first thing I have for this song was that opening line.

I dreamt it. I woke up with it in my head in the middle of the night and I have a voice memory of me. My girlfriend was asleep in the bed next to me, so I was mumbling really quiet. It's almost indescribable.

I've always recorded ideas and stuff, so it wasn't like, okay, that's going to be a song. That was just a piece that got put aside into my palette. And then after a few days, I was in the studio trying to cover David SX Rock on.

So hey, dude, dude, dude, yeah.

He was just like, hard, throw a pin-up boy for the 70s. We had this album, it was pretty soft, but there's a song in there rock on. It's awesome.

So I went into the studio like I normally do and I was just messing around. I tracked the don't, go don't, go don't.

And I knew that I could sing the David SX part over the top of it, the vocals. Like hey, key, Ooby-Doo, DJ, Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun-Dun.

Yeah, he's so kind of fit. And I was like, yeah, that's cool. This can go with my Rock on cover.

But it started to sound really good, and I was like, no, I'm not doing this. This is the cover, you know? Okay, I want to write my own song.

So yeah, that's how I got to this part.

It was the bass line, but it ended up on the track being the world it's are. I obviously tried to play it on bass first and realized I couldn't, because I just bought a bass, you know?

I didn't know what I was doing. And I couldn't play, like a lot of it's really me just playing a section and copying and pasting.

I can play it now, but I played literally one note for the whole song.

And then I put drums.

These claps were done in my home studio at my mom's garage. I was living with my girlfriend at the time, and I would drive each day to the studio, which is where I first started recording, which was like had like a tin roof.

So I couldn't record when it was raining, or if there was wind, because the trees would brush on the roof.

I think I spend the most time on drum sounds than anything else. I spent hours looking for a hi-hat sound.

Because the thing with drum sounds is it needs to sound like it's in one cohesive space. You can't have like a hat that's like really close sounding and then a kick that has distance or it just puts people off.

And it loses that groove. The pockets got to come from sounding like it's a real player. A lot of people put me in that electronic area, but a lot of that's because I don't have the real instruments or the capacity to play them or record them how I want.

So I always envision kind of real drums, and I think my drum samples are getting more and more like that.

...