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.

Grimes is the project of Claire Boucher.

In 2015, she released Art Angels, her fourth album.

In this episode, she breaks down Kill V-Mame and how the experience of writing songs for other artists opened up the way that she writes for herself.

She played all the weak couples, but I'm only one man and I do what I can.

This is Claire Boucher from Grimes.

I was jamming with a friend and this person was really good at making really aggressive music,

and he kept doing these cute little plucky things.

And I was like, no, no, let's make a hard song.

He was like, no, no, you make cute music.

I was like, I was so horrified.

I was like, I can make hard music.

So I went home after that and sort of wanting to prove that I could make up, I don't know,

something that's going to be really aggressive, that I would want to play during an action sequence in a movie or something.

So that was kind of the impetus of how it started.

So the first thing I made for this song was I just got out this old crappy guitar I had,

and I didn't know any chords. I hadn't really played guitar very much.

It's like a single note guitar lead thing, and then I just pitched it down an octave,

just so it sounded more like a bass.

But then later on, I ended up getting a really sweet guitar amp, and so I re-recorded a lot of guitars.

And then also I played some chords that I had subsequently figured out with like better guitar, like my king of real amp.

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