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.

In this episode we'll get a deconstructed view of the song One Second of Love by Nighttool.

I spoke to Ramona Gonzalez and her partner and producer Cole MGM in their home studio in Los Angeles as they took a break from making a new Nighttool record.

Coming up they'll talk about working with friends like Julia Holter who sings backing vocals on this and their own collaborative relationship with one another.

I'm Nighttool and I'm also called Ramona by some people. My name is Cole, I'm Jan and I'm a producer and part of Nighttool.

So in 2010 we started tracking the instrumental ideas for what became One Second of Love.

When we started out recording the idea was just to record ourselves improvising in our friend's studio that they built.

That's incredible called the brick factory. So they're like cool let's just go up there and bring some synths and jam on synths and just no expectations have fun.

One of the stipulations for us because we like to work under certain parameters when we're working on a record was we have to record on tape.

Yeah we just took the opportunity we can only afford one reel of tape which afforded us about like 30 minutes or something like that.

But we turned into an hour we split the tape in half so we can talk.

We said okay it was a 24 track machine and so we said if we do 12 tracks you know we have effectively twice as long you know.

And actually we recorded from literally the first second that the tape started to the very end.

But then it was a long process before that before we even realized that what we needed to do was to take those sessions sample from them and then really go back and sort of write songs you sample.

So that's what we did with this song is we sampled like a 12 minute jam.

Cole got this MS20.

And he started to like mess around with it and get really familiar with how to make these really cool sequences because we had the also the accompanying sequencer with this synthesizer.

We realized that like a lot of the songs could be formulated from creating a sequence on the MS20 and using it as sort of like a metronomic cool sound.

Right so it was rhythmic and melodic.

Yeah.

We wanted something that was rhythmic melodic and also sort of noisy.

I just kind of had a rhythm in my head something that was like and I just kind of said about it.

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