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.

This episode contains explicit language.

Fka8 Twigs is a singer, songwriter, and producer from London. She's released three EPs and two albums.

Her most recent album, Magdalene, came out in 2019 and was named one of the best albums of the year by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Time, Enemy, and more.

For this episode, Twigs chose the song, Mured Heart, from that album. She wrote and produced it in Los Angeles with a few collaborators, but it's an intensely personal song.

I'm with her, and with the love is with her, and the mirrored heart, they just remind me of without you.

This is Fka8 Twigs.

The lyric Mured Heart was something that I had written in my phone for a while.

I'd heard the saying that your greatest love will be somebody who will truly reflect who you aspire to be and can mirror.

It doesn't mean that you have to do the same thing or like the same things. It's more to do with morals or a deeper understanding of life or human values.

Somebody who's going to give what you give, put in what you put in, it's like an equal meeting of two loves.

I write a lot of things down, sometimes they turn into songs or sometimes they turn into things that I write to myself.

So I didn't know necessarily that it was going to be a song at the time, but it presented itself.

I wrote Mured Heart with Ethan, P. Flynn, an amazing musician and songwriter, and it was just Ethan playing on the piano.

He came to visit me in LA. I had this house and I invited a few of my friends to come and work on the record and write and eat together and wake together.

Ethan and I wrote Mured Heart on a very sort of lonely morning, I remember.

Everyone was in bed or out or you know just doing their own thing.

I think we'd maybe even said that that day was like a chill day and we weren't really going to work, but then Ethan and I just found ourselves at the piano just playing around and we just have something really special when we're together.

And it's very melancholy but easy and there's a real sort of like deep blue joy to the music that we make.

He just has all these like deep amazing feelings and unusual chords.

It felt really unusual and quite strange, but also it felt like something that I knew really well.

It felt like a very old song, something that like I would have heard my grandma playing or something like that.

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