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.

This episode contains explicit language.

That was from an interview with Belgian filmmakers, the Dardan Brothers, talking about the kinds of stories they tell, saying human suffering.

That interests us very much.

It also interests Tom Crel, a songwriter and producer who goes by the name How to Dress Well.

After seeing one of the Dardan Brothers films, the kid with a bike, he was inspired to make the song Porsero.

In this episode, he'll dig deep into where that inspiration led him, from transformations within the song, within the film, and within himself.

Now, here's How to Dress Well from an interview recorded live at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco.

My name's Tom, and I play music as How to Dress Well.

The backbone of the song is a sample of Beethoven concerto.

It's sampled from a film, the kid with a bike, by the Dardan Brothers.

They used the music in the film to signal chapter changes.

This boy Crel, he is living in a foster care, contemporary orphanage,

and a woman for no real kind of rational calculation decides to take him, and bring him into her life and try and give him a love which would remedy the wounding he's sort of living out as a young boy.

He's been abandoned by his family and has become quite violent.

And then the movie is quite simple. It's just what unfolds when this woman tries to do this quite courageous moral thing for this already quite damaged child.

People are forced to do either morally courageous things to try and help him or morally compromising things when they're exposed to what happens when we live in a world with abandoned children.

The film just blasted me. I couldn't stop thinking about it for like three or four days after I saw it.

The whole song kind of like flows out of my experience of that film, treating the sample kind of ruthlessly, setting up distortion channels,

and then playing with the gain structure on the distortion channel, trying to bring something novel out of very simple sample.

Yeah, it continues like that. It becomes like progressively more distorted, and sonically I really am attached to those swells and distortions and things going into the red.

I think that when something goes into the red on a recording it can be like a really powerful metaphor is not the right word because it's more like visceral than that.

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