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.

Between 2004 and 2012, the band Grizzly Bear put out four critically acclaimed albums.

Their newest album is called Painted Ruins and it features this song, Four Cypresses.

And in this episode, two of the members of the band, Chris Taylor and Daniel Rossin, tell the story of how the song came together.

This is Daniel Rossin, my name is Chris Taylor, and there's Ed Rosty, and there's Chris Bear who plays drums. He plays a lot of things.

We like to play a lot of different instruments. None of us really like to get stuck in one corner.

Chris Bear was up in my place, upstate, and we were trying this approach where he would just put down a bunch of different drum feels, kind of improvising different drum feels over the same progression.

He played this like roller king drum groove that almost felt like he was very disorienting and we couldn't almost feel where one was in the beat.

It was just kind of like this rolling, strange thing.

He kept messing around with it and he, from that drum idea, he developed this very kind of stable, almost like metronomic part and a little keyboard that starts the song.

The very first moment of the song is, I guess, kind of a wrong note.

And he was doing this like just this tom feel, that thumping room drum recording that you hear.

Another thing that makes this song even more disorienting is the drum groove. It comes in, I think, not even on one. It comes in on a different beat.

The way it develops within the first minute of the song, it's, you don't really quite understand what's going to happen.

The whole thing is, you know, crazy and provides mess, feels chaotic.

And then Chris Bear just put down this like series of bass notes on a world's air.

So he was playing the world's part at the same time as he was playing this little DX100 keyboard.

Everything that opens the tune is like the first things that he Chris played on his own.

Initially, it was a pretty bare bones kind of idea, but I just found it really trance-like.

It seems like it's just sort of slowly pulling you in.

He had a very satisfying, like, slow pace to it and nothing else we were doing really felt like that at the time.

So it sat in this form for like six or seven months like that.

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