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.

This episode contains explicit language.

Lord is a Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and producer.

My full name is Ella, Maria, Lani, Yelot-Kohanna. So it's a whole thing.

Her second album, Melodrama, debuted at number one on the charts in June 2017, five months

before her 21st birthday. In this episode, Ella breaks down her song Sober. You'll hear how it started

with the original demos she made with her co-producer Jack Antonov and how the song changed over the course of working on it for months and months.

My name is Lord. I'm breaking down my song's over.

I remember I had spent the summer in New Zealand and I was reeling from this summer, which was very much like wild and fluorescent.

That first summer on the cusp of being an adult. I'd just come out of a relationship and it was just like drinking all the time.

I'm just like either like sleeping or getting ready for like what we were going to do that

night.

When you come out of a relationship, you just want to fill the quiet as best you can.

You know, you're like, I just don't want to deal with this quite yet.

So I'm going to make every moment full and social and busy and loud, and then I won't have to think

about it. So this song in particular was set at a party, but there's such angst to it. I had this

very distinct memory of standing in the corner of my lounge,

having a very tense conversation with somebody, and people on my back porch dancing.

The DNA of sober is wanting to tell someone how you feel

and knowing they feel the same way and needing the evening's theatre to come and have all the

characters going and then you can let your guard down. That was kind of the spread of the night

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