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, your way.

Madison McFarron is a singer, songwriter, and producer from New York. She's sung with legends like Aretha Franklin, George Clinton, and Dela Sol in the Roots.

Madison's first EP came out in 2016 and last week she released her debut album, Hope He Can Forgive Me.

In the years between the EP and the album, Madison started producing her own music. It wasn't really her plan, but something that developed over the course of the pandemic.

For this episode, I talked to Madison about a song from her album called Run. It was inspired by the discovery that she's the descendant of a woman who escapes slavery.

And it features guest vocals from Madison's father, Grammy winner Bobby McFarron.

But I need you to trust me.

Let me take you from this lens. You don't have to wait, but I need you to trust me.

My name is Madison McFarron.

I'm a live performer. That's the thing that I drive the most joy out of probably in life period.

I decided I wanted to be a singer when I was five, which I think really just came from. I like to sing. I see my dad likes to sing. And that's what his job is. So that seems like I could do that too.

So I started doing acapella stuff, vocal layers and vocal harmony as a live performer for the first three years of my solo career. I was just doing acapella loops.

So with a loop pedal, you know, you start with one layer. And as soon as it stops, you have to start the next layer.

And then you have to start the next layer. And then the next layer.

And then you're kind of locked into that structure that you've made.

I didn't want to just do acapella stuff because I could hear other things in my head. I just didn't know how to get them out. But I didn't start producing until 2020. And I was forced to be at home and not have shows to express my creativity.

But you know, when you're learning how to do something new and it's like you're kind of coming up against a wall for a while. But then this beat was one of the first beats that I made that I was like, oh, this is actually good.

I was intentionally trying to make something that has a lot of forward momentum, a lot of forward energy.

A lot of people tell me that they listen to my music when they're trying to meditate or just, you know, relax their mind. And I think I just wanted to challenge myself to not do the same thing.

So I was listening to the beat over and over and I wanted to add some vocal layers.

I think it's like five layers or something like that. Very much just like this is what's flowing. Let me just do it.

It was fun. It was originally called cramps. I wrote it on a day when I had some like insane period cramps and had eaten like 20 milligrams of edible or something just to like cure the pain and ended up just hanging out at my computer really getting into this groove and then like listening to it for the next week just on loop.

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