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 Hopkins is a composer and electronic music producer who's been nominated twice for the UK's Mercury Prize.

In addition to making his own music, he co-produced Coldplay's Grammy Award-winning album, Viva La Vita, with his frequent collaborator Brian Eno.

In May 2018, John Hopkins released his fifth album Singularity, it was named Best New Music by Pitchfork.

In this episode, John Hopkins takes apart the song Luminous Beings, which was inspired in part by the meditative effects of psilocybin, the compound found in psychedelic mushrooms.

He also details less magical moments where he hated the music he was making and had to destroy it as part of the creative process.

John Hopkins, I'm John Hopkins, when I started writing this track. I was living in California. I'd written maybe six or seven albums, including films, scores and collaborations, all in the same studio in East London.

I really couldn't face the idea of starting what I knew was going to be my biggest project yet in the same room.

I'd been having quite a lot of trouble sleeping around then, which is very common amongst musicians, experiences like you know, you've got very late shows, lots of them, and you've got flights and time zone changes and all these things.

It's just exhausting and overwhelming.

I spent some time in Los Angeles. One of the reasons I went there was to try and find ways around this problem.

So I went there to decompress and get much more deeply into meditation and learn transcendental meditation, which I hadn't done before.

I didn't have a studio there, but I wasn't recording it such, but I just had my laptop and I was just playing around.

That was the core trinity, which is my kind of old go-to synth for sketching things out.

For me, everything is about immediacy. I'm extremely impatient.

John Hopkins uses the music software Ableton Live to write in record.

Ableton has two modes, Clips mode and Arrangement mode and Clips mode. For me, it's like a sort of canvas, really blank canvas. You just chuck ideas down.

They don't have to be in the right order, they don't have to be good. And you can start to build them up and try any number of different combinations of them, and it's a great way of guiding your starting point along.

Mostly just follow instinct and work very quickly and record things.

I was drumming something and I remember I had a MOOC sub fatty, a main synth for the bass line.

What you're listening to there is really like, that's the stuff that all got thrown down really quickly.

But there's a smoothness and a simplicity to that early sketch, which is not something I'm actually looking for in a finished product.

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