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.

Leanne LaHavus is a singer and songwriter from London. She's been nominated for a Grammy and a Brit Award and in 2020 she released her third album.

In this episode she breaks down her song, Can't Fight, and traces its evolution along with her own evolution over several years.

My name is Leanne LaHavus. The idea first came into my head about seven or eight years ago. My boyfriend is a singer and she's a singer.

My name is Leanne LaHavus.

The idea first came into my head about seven or eight years ago. My boyfriend at the time was a bass player and he was showing me all these videos of different bass players that he liked and Victor Wooten came up.

This song I called Me and My Bass Guitar. It's just the most amazing use of the bass.

My boyfriend was teaching me a version of it that could be played on guitar, so I was having loads of fun playing the guitar in a new way.

I just started playing a nice chord that I liked, but I had the muscle memory from learning this Victor Wooten piece. So then a sort of hammer on, percussive riff started happening with the chord that I liked.

When I write a guitar part, it can't be anything that doesn't challenge me because I like feeling that challenge when I'm singing and playing. It kind of evokes writing in me. It makes me more likely to want to write to something.

I started playing guitar when I was 18 years old, so just over 13 years ago now, the only reason I didn't learn guitar as an actual child was because I didn't believe from what I saw that any girls were playing guitar.

It was mostly boys that I saw playing guitar, so that made me not want to do it. But I saw girls playing piano, and it felt accessible to me. And so that became my hobby and my outlet.

And then it wasn't until 18 inspired by women playing guitar, I just wanted to learn everything, and it just made me really love it so much. I remember when I figured out the first rhythm that I learned, I just remember being so deeply satisfied in a new way.

I said, if I can do that with this rhythm, it means I can do that with another rhythm and another one and another one. So as I started writing more and more songs, I used to try and look for a new rhythm for every song that I wrote so that none of them would be the same.

I don't like waste, if there's a piece of guitar or a melody or some words that haven't been used yet in something, then I've got this idea that I'm going to use everything up before I make a new thing.

But basically it was just that one chord, just something I play when I'm practicing or when I'm warming up, because it just feels nice under the fingers. And it stayed like that for all these years until I was in a session with Mura Massa, and it was just figuring out where we should start.

Mura Massa, or Alex, is a wonderful chap. I discovered his music five years ago, and I was like, who the hell is that? That's amazing. I love the sound. I love the rhythm.

So I just asked to meet him, and I ended up doing a session with him, and there was like immediate trust, and when I played him that riff, that's when he said, oh, we should record that. We should make something out of that.

So he took my guitar and then started overdubbing another part on top of my riff. The bit that goes, do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do something like that.

I guess he found the bass line, and when he did that, it signaled what the rest of the chords should be, and then that's what made it a verse. It's as simple as that, because for seven years, I'd have that riff not knowing what to do with it, but as soon as you put a couple of bass notes on it, it turns it into another thing.

So I was finally able to stand outside of it and work with it.

The chords on the chorus stand out, because one of them was a chord that I had just learnt, and this chord is my new favourite chord.

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