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.

In September 2014 Odessa put out their album in return. It debuted at number one on Billboard's dance and electronic charts and spent 13 weeks in the top 10.

But the song Kusinagi isn't a dance track. It slows down the pace of the album and in this episode, Clay and Harrison of Odessa explain why. They tell the story of how they made the track along with their friend and collaborator who they named the song after Sean Kusinagi.

This episode was recorded live at Mogue Fest in Durham, North Carolina. My name is Rishikesh Herway. You're listening to Song Exploder.

I am Clayton Knight, one half of Odessa. I'm Harrison Mills, the other half. We had been playing like a lot of heavy electronic music festivals where it's a DJ act and they're playing these just bangers after banger after banger and he just beats you up. And we're just like kind of burnt out, kind of like beating over the head with this heavy electronic sound for like for so long. We're like, I don't wish we could just make something that's the opposite direction completely. Really low key.

And basically ambient.

We were in LA at Sean Kusinagi's house. Sean's extremely important. He's like the secret third member of Odessa. He introduced me and Clay back in college of note of the since 16 that he's played guitar on every single one of our albums.

This is Sean Kusinagi and I play guitar in Odessa. Clay and Harrison were on tour staying on my couch in LA and I was just messing around playing some chords on a Kusin guitar.

Yeah, when we heard those chords, we knew we needed to do something with them because they sounded so beautiful. We just kept talking about how we'd love to take that. We didn't have our equipment with us really to record too much. So that was just the beginning of the idea.

Since we were on tour, we waited till we were off and we decided we'd go to a very comfortable space to keep working on it. So we went back to Clay and Sean's hometown, which is Bainbridge Island.

It's right outside Seattle. It's a ferry right away. And we went to Sean's parents' house and they have this kind of side house next to their home.

It's right on the water in the rainy northwest. So it's very inspiring.

And yeah, that was the first thing we wanted to start working on them with was that song.

When it came time to go into the studio, that's where we laid down the full chords that you hear in the track.

So those main four chords are actually guitar swells. I played it all with a volume pedal. So you can hear, if you listen to it closely, you can hear the kind of hiss of the amp when the volume gets all the way up.

To me, it felt like kind of a distant memory and feelings of longing. That was something we really thought about and how do we keep emphasizing that feeling.

The children vocals. It's actually an old Christmas record and it's it's chopped up.

So they're not saying words anymore because I think when lyrics are said, you make an instant.

And that's we're going for more of an emotive tone and atmosphere to immerse yourself in instead of a specific meeting.

We had these ideas for these strings, but it's like we can't hire an orchestra. So we found ways around it and ways to like make these sounds that were kind of corny in the computer and layer them properly to make something unique and kind of special.

The electronic music we make, it's important for us to have a very human aspect to it.

That's us dropping stuff on a table. I think we've had some sticks where we break. It's like a plank of wood. I think there's like ripped paper.

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