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 Rishi Kei-Chayh.

This is KeyChange, where I talk to fascinating people about the music that transform their lives.

My guest today is chef David Chang. He founded Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004.

That was just the start of his incredible career.

He's opened several restaurants, winning awards, and Michelin stars along the way, and

becoming a fixture in the upper echelon of food.

He's the host of the Netflix show's Ugly Delicious and Dinner Time Live, as well as his

own podcast, The Dave Chang Show. For this episode, I talked to Dave about the song, I See a Darkness.

It's the title track on the album by Bonnie Prince Billy, aka Will Oldham, which came out in 1999.

Later, Johnny Cash would cover I See a Darkness in 2000 as a duet with Will Oldham, as part of Johnny Cash's acclaimed American series.

I want to give a content warning before getting into the episode here, because this conversation

is a heavy one. Dave talks about his depression, because that figures entirely into his

relationship with this song. And later on, he talks a bit about his friendship with Anthony Bourdain,

who, if you're not familiar

with him, was an iconic, towering figure in the food world, and he died by suicide in 2018.

I feel like I need to include something here that Dave said in our interview.

In today's day and age in 2025, where people are talking about mental health and mental

illness, it always pisses me off when

somebody hurts themselves and you read the newspaper and they always put in the call the suicide

hotline at there. It fucking drives me insane. I'm like, you think that's going to change it? Like,

this is the problem. We're just having a hard time, like having a conversation about it.

...