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 Kesh Hirwe.

Kimbra is a singer from New Zealand. Her first album came out in 2011.

In 2013, she won two Grammys for a collaboration she did with Gautier for the multi-platinum hit song,

Somebody That I Used to Know.

In this episode, Kimbra breaks down a song of hers from 2018 called Top of the World.

Collaboration is a big part of this song, too.

Coming up, Kimbra traces how musical experiments she made with Skrillix and with Diplo ended up getting transformed into different parts of this song.

See me run, see me out, see me on the goals.

I'm on top. I'm on top of the world.

Need a break.

Then I'll take to the top of the world.

My name is Kimbra.

The start of the song happened at Skrillik Studio. We met backstage at Coachella, and then, you know, we talked about hanging out because we were both living in the same part of town in L.A. He invited me over to his studio, and we were just like listening to beats together. I was playing him some of my demos. He was playing me things he had and pulls up this beat.

This almost seance like trance beat. I'm like, yo, this is really sick. And I started,

you know, just moving along to it. And I guess I just started singing along.

Won, won, won, won, won, won. Just kind of made this noise in my mouth, like a kind of low, I guess, almost didgeridoo or something, you know, quite textural.

And he's like, that's sick, let's record it.

The beauty of Skrillx working with him is he so fast,

and he just presses record and I'm singing it into the mic at the computer.

We start layering it.

At that point, I wasn't really thinking about what the song would be about or even if it would be for me. I mean, a lot of the time when you're writing, especially with DJs, you don't know where that stuff's going to end up. So it didn't get very far in terms of arrangement that day. We decided to kind of sit on it for a bit. He had it on his computer, so he pulled it up with a bunch of people who were coming

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