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.

Jenae Iko is a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter. She's released three albums so far.

And in addition to her own records, she's been a featured guest vocalist on songs by Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Childish Gambino, and many others.

In 2017, she released her third album, Trip, which debuted at number five on the Billboard charts and includes the song Sativa.

Sativa features guest vocals from Sway Lee, whose one half of the band Rish rumored.

In this episode, Jenae tells the story of how Sativa was first made and how it got stuck and then how it got unstuck.

I spoke to her along with producer Brian Warfield of the production duo, Fistikovs, who made the beat.

My name is Jenae Iko.

My name is Brian Warfield. I'm a producer and one half of Fistikovs.

Fistikovs are Mac and Brian. They produced my first mixtape and the majority of all of my albums.

So yeah, they're my guys.

We started with the chords.

Just the Aries chords.

That specific sound was like a chord stab that I found.

And from there, I just pitched it to different keys.

With Jenae, it's like, that's kind of like the vibe that we said.

It's just real airy, smooth.

Her vocal tone is just so smooth that it'd be kind of like to play off that.

But at the same time, we'd like to have the bass in there.

Stuff that hits, you know, it's kind of like a juxtapose.

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