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.

Before this episode starts, I want to let you know that there's some frank discussion of mental health issues,

including panic attacks, medical fears, and thoughts of self-harm. There's also some explicit language.

Marie Ullven is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Norway, who makes music under the name Girl in Red.

She just released her debut album in April 2021, but she's already got a lot of fans and critical acclaim from two EPs and singles that she released online,

including a couple of songs that went gold. The New York Times included her songs in their best songs of the year for both 2018 and 2019.

Last year, she was nominated for Best New Comer at the Norwegian Grammys, and this year, she won their award for international success of the year.

Asking Do you listen to Girl in Red has also become a kind of code on TikTok, a sort of shibla, to ask if someone's a lesbian.

In this episode, Marie breaks down the song Serotonin, a song that started as a video she posted to her own TikTok in the early days of lockdown in 2020.

You'll hear the original version she recorded on her own before she started working with producer Matthias Teles,

and later with Grammy-winning artist and producer Finneas O'Connell, who helped finish this song.

My name is Marie, and I am the artist behind Girl in Red.

My mom's house is in Horton, Norway, which is a very small town, like an hour outside of Oslo.

That's where I grew up, that's where I learned everything when it comes to music, and that's where I became who I am.

So it was the beginning of quarantine, and I had gone back home to my mom because I was really mentally ill and I was completely dysfunctional, so I had to stay there.

I was going through some really weird stuff. I thought I was going to die, whether it was from blood clots or heart attacks,

just like all these weird health issues, because I just had a feeling of illness.

I really believed those feelings of illness to be real, and it was just really hard being home also,

because I was suddenly leaving my everyday life, and also the world was ending, it felt like, at least to me.

I don't know, it was a lot of things changing very fast.

I think I started therapy in January or something of 2020, and I found out I had OCD, which made a lot of sense,

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