You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece

tell the story of how they remained.

My name is Tao Wen.

Melina Duterte goes by the name J-Song.

She's a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist.

She's released three albums as J-Song and has produced, engineered, and mixed each one.

Her third album, Anuko, came out in August 2019.

And in this episode, Melina breaks down a song from it called Tenderness.

I'm Melina from J-Song.

I started writing Tenderness summer of 2018.

I just moved to LA and I was doing a lot of production work for other people.

This artist came over to work with me for her whole record.

And there was one day where I had to clean her entire hard drive.

And I noticed that there was a folder that said vintage drum machines.

And I just like, copy and paste it onto my computer because I was like, it's right

there.

She doesn't know that, but it's okay.

And I just like, experimented with all of those.

I started off by recording this Lynn LM1 drum machine.

That's like the Prince drum sampler.

And I know he used that and like all the hits.

And at the time I was listening to a lot of Steeley Dan.

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