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 Hirway.

This episode of Song Exploder is made possible by IBM.

It was recorded in front of a live audience at IBM's offices in New York City, and it was a great experience.

I learned a lot about the work that IBM's doing in partnership with the Grammys, which includes the Grammy IQ trivia game that you can check out at IQ.gramm.com. It was built with IBM Watson X, and it's just one of the ways IBM helps create smarter business. This episode contains explicit language. Leon Thomas is a singer,

songwriter, producer, and actor. He's nominated for six Grammys at this year's Grammy

Awards, including Best New Artist, Best R&P album, an album of the year for Mut. Mutt is his second

album, and I talked to Leon about the title track,

which was a breakout hit. He'd already won a Grammy for his work with Siza, but he reached

a new level in his own career with this song and this album. I also spoke to David Phelps and

Rob Garringer, aka D. Feltz and Freaky Rob, who produced the song. She said, take your time with the rush.

I said, baby, I'm a dog, I'm a mud.

She said, take your time.

What's the rush?

Oh, oh, I said, baby, I'm a dog, I was doing the album mud it was a transitional period in my life. You know, I'd have to the day when you first started writing mud, what was going on in your life? Right around the time when I was doing the album mud, it was a transitional period in my life. You know, I had records that were doing

very well for other artists. There was a song that I produced for Cizza called Snoos that was

like burning up the charts. Previous to that, I was working with Drake a lot. But at the end of

the year, I was very frustrated because

I felt like my first album, Electric Dusk, was getting some love, but it wasn't enough to really

shake the building. And we had a new president coming in to the label. And it was a very scary

time because sometimes when the person that signs you leaves the label,

the next person could easily say, all right, we're not sure about this kid.

...