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.

Common is a Grammy and Oscar-winning rapper, actor and activist from Chicago. He's been making records since 1992 and in October he released his 13th album, A Beautiful Revolution.

In this episode, he breaks down how he made the song, Arriot in My Mind, along with a handful of collaborators, including Lenny Kravitz and a cameo from Chuck D.

I see great until the fire next song is burning down, that's a riot in My Mind. It's a war outside, when it's quiet it's a riot in My Mind.

My name is Carmen, so at the end of the summer I was in LA. I wasn't planning on making an album, but what led me to making an album was the song I was working on for a children's show. It was a show called Bookmarks where different people, authors, actors, re-children's books.

And these books were really uplifting and saying, hey, we all are one.

It's called Don't Forget Who You Are, in this featuring PJ.

Don't Forget Who You Are, Don't Forget Who You Are.

When we made this song, first of all, it just organically felt like, oh man, I love making music, this just feels so good to make some music and to be creating with these co-creators that I love.

But then it was the reaction to that song which I wrote for children, but people I knew were like, man, I love this song, it makes me feel good.

And it was like a moment where I understood that, wait, I need to make some music that's going to be inspiring, that's going to uplift, that's going to bring the energy up and give hope and motivate people.

So we wrote that song, got it complete, got it mixed, and I said, man, let's do some more studio sessions.

I just experienced like so many of us, the pandemic, and I started seeing the world in a new way, kind of more from a more spiritual way.

I started getting more in tune with the creator with God, and I also was in a place of seeing what had occurred over the summer with the killings of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, Amade Arbery and the shooting of Jacob Blake and just the emotional unrest and tension that existed.

I actually went out throughout the summer to the protests. I went one time to Minnesota a few weeks after George Floyd's killing for a meeting with some elected officials and community activists, and then I went to Louisville, Kentucky for Rally for Brianna Taylor for her family and really encouraging the people of Kentucky to be active and making sure that the people who had killed Brianna Taylor were brought to justice.

And that protest really was life-enhancing for me to be a part of. I felt anger, I felt pain, I felt strength, I felt inspired, I felt the inspiration of the people that really affected me.

At that moment, I was like, I'm going to do an album, and it's going to be movement music.

Right in my mind really wasn't constructed until the end of September. I wrote the song with my collaborators Isaiah Sharkey, Boone Bishop, Karine Riggins, Robert Glasper and PJ.

At that point, we had a beautiful, colorful, collage of music for the album, but I wanted to see if we could come up with something else.

I don't know exactly what that may be, but I think it should be something hard.

When I was thinking about movement music, I truly wanted to make sure I captured the anger, the hurt, the angst.

So in my mind, as soon as I'm saying that, I'm like, I need another raw joint, like a joint where I can just give you that energy where you get charged.

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