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.

The band Ebay is made up of twin sisters Naomi Diaz and Lisa Kainte Diaz. When they were only teenagers

They were assigned to a record deal by Richard Russell would previously signed artists like Adele and vampire weekend to his label

Excel recordings. He also co-produces their records. In this episode Naomi and Lisa Kainte take apart the 2017 Ebay song Deathless.

My name is Naomi Diaz and I'm the percussionist and I produce.

My name is Lisa Kainte and I play the piano and I sing and I write the songs.

So this song starts about this racist encounter I had when I was 16 with a policeman. It was in Paris.

I was in the subway going to my piano class and I have a club saying what's your name?

I had never been stopped by a club before so I'm like hi.

I'm Lisa Kainte Diaz and I said no do you use drugs and I said no and every time he would come closer to my face and then he said do you drink and I said no and which is true

I don't smoke I don't drink and I don't use drugs and then he came even closer and he said are you fucking kidding me?

He make you take your shoes off your socks. She was barefoot in the subway and then what happened is he took my bag and

threw everything that was in it on the floor and then he realized I was reading a big book and he saw

a petition of Chopin because I was going to my music class and then he froze and I think he thought

she might have a little bit of intelligence so he stopped giving me my empty bag in my hand and left

and when you're 16 you understand there's something wrong in what happened and you shaken but you don't understand why

and it's only when I went back to my mother and I said to her what had happened and she turned red

and started almost crying and I understood that yeah that was not something that was supposed to happen to me

it's been six years since this happened so we decided that we were going to write a song about it

the production starts with just us jamming in the studio without producer Richard Russell and just

playing music and playing around and trying to find something interesting Richard is our producer

...