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, your way.

Jack Johnson is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter from Hawaii. He's had four number one albums on the Billboard charts.

In September 2017, he released his seventh album, All the Light Above It, too.

And in this episode, Jack Johnson breaks down one of the songs from that album. It's about parenting, politics, and the ocean. It's called You Can't Control It.

I'm Jack Johnson, and I'm happy to be here. This song is started from a little jam that my good friend, Zach Gill, that Zach and I had made.

He's got this little space in his garage. We go in there sometimes and just jam around, make noises and stuff. And this one day, I jumped on the drums, and he started playing on the keys.

And then I added a little bass part to it.

Zach, we're like brothers. He was born on the same day, same year, everything. We've been friends since we were 18. We would get together and stay up all night and get a four track out, right down ideas, and then try to sing them.

And I learned a lot from that. He was the first person I ever met where I felt that comfort to share lyrics with, and those kind of things.

I love playing the drums. Probably my favorite instrument to play, but I'm pretty limited in my drum beats. But it's just so meditative to sit there and get into a groove.

So we're just goofing around, and I think it was time for dinner, and we were like, don't forget that idea. I just put it down.

He sent it to me like a month later. He's like, I remember this jam, and I was thinking, oh, it's nice.

So when I started making the record, I played it for my friend Robbie that was helping me produce Robbie Lackerts.

And he dug the groove, but the first thing that Robbie said when I played it to him was, like, oh, it's cool, but we got to get rid of those 90s drums.

Sounds like every 90s hit right there. And I was like, no way. It's like, James Brown, funky drummer beat.

He's like, no, not at all. He was like, that's more of the Wonder Wall beat.

And so anyways, I was like, all right, whatever. I was a little offended, but not that much. So when we started, I went with like a cross thick on the snare.

And instead of trying to use my foot, which is pretty clumsy, I just took the mallet and hit the kick drum with my hand.

Just started with the boom, boom, boom, boom.

So then I would go with the high hat, and it was nice because I could use two hands on it.

You know, I could do all these things that I can't do if I'm sitting behind the drums. We just kept layering it.

And then we were kind of both thinking I could need a little more like an ambience, a little more ethereal kind of a feel.

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