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.

This episode contains explicit language.

Moses Sumney is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles. His first album, Aro Manticism, came out in September 2017.

But before that, he'd already worked with an impressive and diverse list of collaborators from Syphian Stevens to Salange to Karen O of the A-A-Yaz to Skrillex.

That spirit continues with the song Moses takes apart in this episode. It has contributions from producers Cam Obey and Paris Stuther and legendary bassist Thundercat. Here's Moses Sumney breaking down his song Coral.

My name is Moses Sumney. When I was making my album, I was looking for a manager at the time.

One of the managers I was meeting with suggested, you should get in the studio with this guy, Cam Obey.

I was super reluctant to do it because it's such an LA thing for like songwriters to go to sessions with random producers or other songwriters.

But I hated that. Cam's a brilliant producer. But most of the stuff he's done has been either hip-hop stuff or R&B stuff.

Typically, I would have said no, but I think I was just curious about what could happen. I ended up really loving Cam.

The first session that we had for this song was in 2015. We had met for the first time and it just talks about music for like two hours.

And we were showing each other stuff back and forth and he showed me stereo lab for the first time.

And I showed him like some radiohead stuff I liked.

And I just went back and forth playing each other stuff for like two hours. And that inspired us to go out into the world and make something.

He started making this beat.

This kind of drum machine, the like to duck, duck, I was very intrigued by the kind of vintage vibe I had.

I started messing around on the guitar, just messing with a few chords.

And Cam, he had a keyboard. He's a really great keyboard player and he just started laying down this keyboard part.

And we went back and forth on these four chords.

It reminded me of a really nice lullaby. At that point I was pretty inspired. I was listening to the drum machine and the keyboard.

And I really just started singing in my head and trying to make a fill for melodies. And then I just went into booth and freestyle.

I typically find melodies by going in and just singing forever until something emerges.

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