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 Hirway.

I interviewed the Scottish band Churches back in March 2016 in Austin, Texas.

A few weeks ago, in May 2018, they released a new album called Love is Dead.

It features contributions from David Stewart of the Eurythmics and another past song

exploder guest, Matt Bernager of the National.

So in honor of Churches' new record, I wanted to go back and listen to their episode again.

Here it is.

Churches is a trio from Glasgow, Scotland.

In this episode, they break down the song Clearest Blue from their sophomore album, Every Open Eye.

You'll hear the band's original demo, as well as why they start songs with a set of rules, but then quickly abandon those rules.

This interview was recorded live at the Dropbox podcast studio at South by Southwest.

I'm Martin and I play keys and stuff.

I'm Lauren and I sing.

I'm Ian and I also play keys and stuff.

We were trying to make a laid-back song, weren't we?

Honestly, I swear, I swear.

That's the thing about this band, though.

We always set out with rules and then we're useless at sticking to them.

The other role for this song was, let's do a song with two chords.

And of course, ten minutes later, Martin's off on another, you know, the minor.

But we're terrible at sticking to rules, but that's, you know, that's the fun part, is like creating boundaries and then smashing them, you know.

...