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.

Since her debut in 2002, Nora Jones has sold over 50 million albums and won eight Grammys.

In 2016, she released Daybrakes, her sixth album.

In this episode, she takes apart the title track and details how all the pieces came together unexpectedly.

Coming up, you'll hear the original demo and how the song was transformed in the studio, including a session with Jazz Saxophone legend, Wayne Shore.

Plus, a few thoughts from Nora's co-producer, Sarah Oda. It's Nora Jones on Song Exploder.

I'm Raya Hayley-Mohawk.

Hey, I'm Nora Jones.

This song came about a long time ago, maybe two or three years ago.

My organ player, Pete Remini, we're just kind of jamming and it started out with him playing guitar and doing this weird thing that actually ended up starting the song.

It sounds like a deep tremolo, but really he's actually just turning the volume of the guitar up and down.

Which is funny, because you could probably just do a tremolo, but he's not a traditional guitar player.

You know, I feel like real guitar player would never do that. I don't know.

I love it when people play instruments. They're not as cool on and it's always cool.

Day breaks in your head was the first line I wrote.

And I liked the line too, so that kind of started the lyric and the melody.

I like that it's not day breaks, one word, it's day breaks, two words, which can have a couple different meanings.

It's the start of the day and it's also, you know, the day is being shattered. I don't know. Honestly, I just like the way it sounds.

So we just had a demo of it for years, just kind of lying around and then just kind of forgotten about.

I had gotten into playing a lot of piano and I was writing a lot of stuff for this record and I remember pulling it out and thinking,

I wonder if this would sound cool in piano and then I just started playing it.

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