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.

Kalella is a singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles. In 2015, true-leased hallucinogen and landed on critics lists in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Pitchfork and More.

In this episode, Kalella takes apart her song Rewind. To make the track, she worked with five different producers, picking and choosing each for what they could best contribute to her overall vision for the song.

This interview was recorded live in San Francisco, at Fusion's Real Future Fair. Now, here's Kalella on Song Exploder.

I had the intention to make a Miami-based inspired song that gave me butterflies or that made me feel romance, but something light and fun. It's like I wanted that Ghost Town DJ's feel.

I received a track from a producer who goes by OBS City. He sent me a whole collection of instrumentals, and this one just jumped out at me.

It was actually the baseline that I couldn't get off of. I just sort of fixated on that, and so I kept trying to sing over the track as is, over and over and over again, and I didn't get anywhere.

I left it alone, and then one day I came back to it with my friend Nugget. He's also a writer, so I think that the advantage of working with somebody who produces and writes is that, you know, the idea doesn't have to come out disjointed.

You're writing the song, and you're making the song at the same time, so I told him what I'm hearing is a Miami-based track, and I finally got stems for this song.

So can you just pull the baseline out?

And then he added a lead, which basically took me to Never Never Land.

And then the baseline worked against that sort of major harmony.

So that lead is what anchors a lot of my melody, and it allowed me to improvise.

I first improvised a writ, and it's just,

and I'm just feeling it, you know, like I know the emotion.

I know what I'm saying. I don't know the words. As soon as I finished, I was just like, what is that? What is that feeling?

Like, what is, it's nostalgic? That's what we kept saying. There's something like you missed it, or a little bit of lamenting, but not really dwelling, you know?

And I was just sort of like, I don't know what happened just now, and then I just had this click moment, because I had just returned from Brazil for the first time.

And one of the things that happened was, I was invited to a club, and my best friend met a girl.

They met earlier in the day, they clicked, and we all went to this club together, and she didn't actually make the move.

I was hung out all night, and then I was about to leave, and I was just like, I'm about to go, and she was like, I'm going to come with you.

So we were walking out the door, and when we got to the door, she was like, I'm not going to go.

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