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.

The band converged formed in 1990 when its members were teenagers. They've been making music that lived somewhere in the intersection of punk, hardcore and metal for almost 25 years.

Guitars Kurt Ballu spoke to me from his studio, God City, which is where converged rights and records. I also spoke over the phone with singer Jake Bannon.

Coming up, they'll talk about how the physical space of God City influenced their songwriting, how the Boston Hardcore scene gave them a home, and how to get the classics, Swedish Death Metal guitar tone.

Hi, this is Kurt Ballu from the band Converge. I play guitar in the band and I'm also a recording engineer, and I recorded the majority of our most recent material.

The other members of Converge are Jake Bannon on vocals, Nate Newton on bass, and Ben Kohler on drums. Today we're going to talk about the song Dark Horse, which is the first song on our 2009 album, Acts 2 Fall.

The guitar tracks on this song, I fall into this trap whenever I'm recording, especially a converged record where like if I do something, I want to use it, I'm not good at editing out the stuff that I've put effort into.

Sometimes I'll record tracks with a whole bunch of different tones just to experiment to see which one I like the best of what I end up usually doing is just using all of them.

This record had a little bit of a longer recording process where we sort of picked out it over the course of several months, and within that process I was recording other bands.

And one of the bands that I recorded was called Black Breath, and I really liked the guitar sound that I got for them and decided late at night after one of their sessions to do another layer of guitar tracks with their guitar tone and this record.

The big character of their tone is the boss Heavy Metal Pedal, which is pretty well known these days for producing the classic Swedish Death Metal tone for some reason, a bunch of American post hardcore type bands have latched onto that in recent years.

It's a pretty awesome tone, so I use that, it's just layered for thickness.

Hi, I'm Jake, I think for Converge and Creed visuals, right lyrics, all that stuff.

The song is about losing a friend and looking through that loss at the rest of your life that you have in front of you and what you can do with it.

To me, it's a very positive song, trying to ride towards positivity, trying to live a constructive, positive life.

I feel that people that don't really understand our band, they would possibly misinterpret a sort of aggression level for something that was not positive in some way.

They're about trying to find some sort of light at the end of the tunnel, negative themes, not really our style, it's not who we are as people.

Jake really has two different modes that he sings in, there's Shouting Jake,

and there's Monster Jake.

Jake, we're going to use this pretty much an entire lungs worth of air for every word.

I think recording vocals is one of the hardest things to do, particularly in a hardcore band, because vocalists, they feed off the energy of crowd.

And so when you're standing on a stage and you've got all these people with their eyes fixed on you and you've got a drummer like Ben behind you and Nate and I, and it's super loud.

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