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 Drop Kick Murphy's formed in Boston in 1996. For over 20 years, they've made music that's reflected the culture and community they've come from.

In January 2017, they released the album, 11 short stories of pain and glory. In this episode,

guitarist Tim Brennan breaks down how the music for Blood was made and Ken Casey explains the inspiration behind the lyrics.

This is Tim Brennan from the Drop Kick Murphy's, I play guitar and accordion. Over the course of the last few albums,

our songs started getting played in like Fenway Park and the song that the band wrote about the Bruins will get played in Boston Garden during a hockey game.

And without fail every time it would come on, we would turn to each other and go, why does it sound terrible? And then you hear an ACDC song come on.

You're like, man, that sounds phenomenal and our thing just sounds weird and muddled. But then we became friends and luckily colleagues with our now producer Ted Hut, who explained to us that space is pretty vital when it comes to things sounding huge and in a situation like that.

You know, we were used to coming up with these sort of raucous punk songs. And so I was just sort of thinking about that a little bit and wanting to see if I could make a Drop Kick Murphy song that was in the vein of these giant stadium rock songs.

I play guitar for the Drop Kick split. My first instrument is the drums. So a lot of musical ideas that I have sometimes they're based around drum parts or ideas for drum beats and things like that.

I got the idea to try to do something that had like a we will rock you type of beat underneath it just do.

I was playing an electric guitar but unplugged just sitting on my couch just sort of showing I record a lot of things in my voice memos before I start playing anything I just kind of lay out the drum beat.

I had to come up with a drum beat, fooling around on the guitar. I had stumbled across a chord pattern that I thought was interesting.

I was like, I'm not sure if I could do it.

I was like, I'm not sure if I could do it.

I was like, I'm not sure if I could do it.

I probably sat in that basic demo form for a year and a half or two years and then we started actually getting together to flesh out the ideas for what will become this new album.

Matt Kelly our drummer and I will meet at the space and he'll record a drum track and then I'll take it home and record everything else over it.

And then bring it to everybody and say here's what this could possibly sound like. What do we think?

So we typically have a fairly good idea of what things are going to sound like when we're going into the studio but we had never done something like that that's sort of a slower tempo but still sort of big and triumphant.

The physical studio that we were recording in was a pretty giant area room and once we started getting the drum track down and you could really hear all that space and the sort of breath of the room itself.

It was like this is going to work beautifully.

...