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.

John Batiste is a pianist, songwriter and composer from New Orleans.

He's been nominated for multiple Grammys and he just won the Golden Globe and got an Oscar nomination for the soundtrack to the Pixar film Soul,

which he composed along with Trent Rezner and Atticus Ross.

John is also a recipient of the American Jazz Museum's Lifetime Achievement Award and on weeknights you can see him as the band leader on the late show with Steven Colbert.

In March 2021, he put out his new album We Are. But the title track from it actually came out much earlier in June 2020.

We put the song out during the Black Lives Matter protest before it was even finished being mixed and mastered.

In this episode, John talks about how he drew from his roots both at a personal level and at a cultural level and move all of it into the song.

I'm John Batiste.

So I started working on this song in September of 2019 with Kizzo, a great producer from the Netherlands and Autumn Ro.

We met up in New York City and this is pre-COVID. My life is busy. I'm doing the late show. I'm writing the score for Soul.

I have so many different things going on at the same time, but I really wanted to find a way to write.

And we got together for nine days and with a laptop and a MIDI keyboard and a bunch of instruments in my dressing room at the Airsellovent Theatre.

We started working on songs. Autumn and Kizzo would be in the dressing room working. I would be in their work and popping in and out to do things.

And there wasn't a lot of time for the critical and the critical side of music making. It was more along the lines of sparks of inspiration that we capture and then move on to the next spark.

You know, Carol Burnett, she told me some that I didn't even realize until four years into it being my dressing room that that was her dressing room when she was doing the Carol Burnett show.

She would tell me all kinds of stories about what happened in that dressing room and obviously the Airsellovent Theatre has all of these tightens of culture and music that have all walked through those halls and played on that stage.

And I think that we captured some of the spirits that are in that space. But at the end of ten songs or so, this was the first day where we'd hit a wall and we felt,

well, maybe this is the end of the road and we thought we had kind of maxed out. And I left the room to take a phone call and it was like a long phone call. Maybe I was something. I'd come back into the room and there's this beat.

It's drums and chords. And I was like, oh, well, maybe we're not done yet. It's always the same feeling when I get inspired. I just feel like I want to dance. I feel like I want to get up and grab it and hug it.

Autumn has this really wonderful gift of creating melodies and she had something on track that resonated with me.

So she's doing something and that's like, woo! Typically the way that we work is she'll have a melody or something like that. And then I'll write to my heart.

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