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.

Lorley Rodriguez is a singer, songwriter and producer who goes by the name Empress Ev.

She's released two albums and she's sung on tracks with Khalid, Blood Orange and Dirty Projectors.

Her first album, Me, was made on her own, but her second album, Us, features a bunch of collaborators.

In this episode, Lorley breaks down the Empress of Song when I'm with him.

She co-produced it with Jimmy Stack and Dan Nygrow, and I spoke to Jimmy Stack about the making of this song too.

Lorley explained how collaborating opened up her process.

Plus, the song's lyrics are in English and Spanish, and Lorley describes how she relies on both languages to write.

My name is Lorley. I'm also known as Empress Ev.

When I made my first record, I was in New York, and it was produced by me, written by me, very isolated process.

And then I moved to LA, and I started to collaborate more when I moved here.

At least that was my objective, because the beauty of collaboration is you do things that you don't normally do when you're by yourself.

And that's something that I wanted to achieve on this record, testing myself, and pushing my boundaries with melodies and production.

My name's Jimmy Stack.

He's an amazing producer and songwriter in Los Angeles.

The first time I heard Empress Ev, I was like, wow, this is just really distinct and different.

And her voice is just so captivating.

That's a song for my first album.

All I knew was that she sang obviously, and was a producer.

And my sounds typically are very icy and bear, but when I went into the studio with Jimmy, he played me this loop that he had started working on with this warm synth pad.

And I was like, I have to write on top of this, because I don't usually write over textures like that.

And the whole point of working with other people is to step out of your comfort zone.

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