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.

In 1996, Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, released his first album, Introducing.

It's been held pretty much universally as one of the best albums of the 90s,

and Time Magazine included it in its top 100 albums all time.

It changed the face of hip-hop and electronic music, and helped define the trip-hop genre.

Now, for the 20th anniversary of the release, DJ Shadow breaks down the song, Me Too A Slum.

This is Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow.

The record store on the cover of Introducing called Records in Sacramento, California.

That record store was my muse. If I felt like I ever was kind of hitting a creative brick wall,

I would get in my car, I would drive to go to that record store once or twice a week for the entire duration that I was working on the album.

Just spend a few hours looking at records, listening to records,

and generally without really even trying very hard,

I would chance upon something that inevitably unlocked whatever jam I was in creatively.

That's where I found the drums, which come from a European Prague Jazz record.

I think the only part of the original sample that I kind of left pretty much unchanged was the noisy intro,

the kind of drum fill with the guitar feedback over the top.

I don't like to just loop a one bar break.

The rhythmic bassist, the breakbeat, has to be the strong foundation upon which everything else is built.

If you chop a breakbeat and there's five or six different kicks you can use,

five or six different snares you can use, what I like to do is alternate between the three or four strongest kicks,

the three or four strongest snares, until you've reassembled a kind of superversion of the original.

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