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.

Kimbera 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,

Kimber breaks down a song of hers from 2018 called Top of the World. Collaboration is a big part of this song too. Coming up, Kimber traces how musical experiments she made with Skrillex and with Diplo ended up getting transformed into different parts of this song.

How's my name is Kimbera?

My name is Kimbera.

The start of this song happened at Skrillex 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 LA. 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 the speed.

This almost say on its 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.

I 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 Skrillex, working with him is he's 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 riding with specially 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 are coming through his studio.

I remember him texting me, be like, yo Anderson Pack really digs it.

Like he's going to put something down and I'm with the big men's room and he's going to try something and I was like, oh that's dumb.

I love that idea of making something and just letting it go out into the universe and see where it flies.

But I think it was always assumed that if a rapper ended up taking the track that I would be involved.

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