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, your way.

I've always loved writing with other people, and my first experiences of songwriting were with my best friend Andrew from school.

We both started playing guitar about the same time, and we were both obsessed with the Beatles.

We had one of these books, you know how to play the Beatles' chords, and we just couldn't do it. We learned the chords, but they just didn't sound right.

Years later, this funny girl, my girlfriend, Flah, had the same book. I was like, no way this is the book that Andrew tried to learn the guitar from.

I started playing along with her, and I was like, no way these chords are all wrong. All these years later, like as somebody who knows the guitar a little bit better than when I was 14 or whatever,

I was like, no way that's why we couldn't learn these songs, because the chords are actually wrong.

But I have so much to thank that book for, because the songs didn't sound right when we played them. Andrew and I, we both said, let's just make our own songs up with the chords that we know.

And that's how I started writing songs, is because if we wrote our own songs, nobody was going to tell us that they didn't sound how they were supposed to sound, because it was us who dictated how they were supposed to sound.

I am Alex Capranos of the band, Franz Ferdinand.

Franz Ferdinand formed in 2002 in Glasgow, Scotland. They've sold millions of albums. They've won the Mercury Prize and two Brit Awards, and they have five Grammy nominations.

One of their first singles, Take Me Out, is also their biggest hit. In this episode, Singer and Guitarist Alex Capranos tells the story of how he and his bandmates made the song, from the original home demo to the final studio recording.

I'm just across there. I'm just as sure that we can die.

Nick McCarthy, who was in the band with me at the time, he and I shared a flat in Glasgow.

We were both writing a lot of songs at the time. Some songs I would write myself, and some songs we would write together.

I was really taken with the idea of writing songs in the original Lenin McCartney style, and like head to head, the two of you sitting opposite each other, kind of working it out.

I remember hearing from Nick's room, he was mucking about on one of these old keyboards. The kind of thing you would get for Christmas when you were 12 or 13, like my first midi keyboard kind of thing.

They're great because they have the auto accompaniment mode on them. So you can hold your finger down on a key and it'll play a crappy baseline and it'll play the chords or whatever.

I had one of these in the flat and I heard Nick in his bedroom mucking about with it. There was this little melody.

Don't do it. Just like that. There's just this little basic kind of thing.

I just remember Chappel and I said, let's make some. Let's make a song.

We took it into the other room and we start trying different progressions you could do behind that little hook.

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