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.

Guapalai is a singer-songwriter from the Bay Area.

She released her first album in 2001.

Since then, she's released five more albums and collaborated with Snoop Dogg.

In 2017, on her album Dreamseeker, she put out the song Stand.

It was written in the wake of the shooting death of Oscar Grant,

a 22-year-old black man who was shot and killed while unarmed and handcuffed on a subway platform

by a Bay Area rapid transit police officer.

The shooting took place in 2009.

Coming up, Guapalai explains why it took eight years for her to finish the song.

My name is Guapalai.

I first started working on this song in 2009.

Oscar Grant had just been murdered by the Barth Police in Oakland

and Oscar Grant seemed like a younger person, I would know.

It could have been someone that was like a nephew or a cousin.

He wasn't an activist.

He wasn't involved in anything super crazy on the streets.

He was like a regular young guy hanging out with his friends.

It was very tangible and relatable and an obvious threat of like this could be anybody.

I think it was just a wake-up call of how close to home the brutality and profiling is.

There were these rallies going on in downtown Oakland and our studio was in West Oakland

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