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, rapper open mic eagle talks about making the song dark comedy morning show along with the tracks producer Walker Ashby aka toy light.

Mike talks about how toy lights original instrumental inspired him and how his view of his own vocals on the track has changed since recording them.

My name is open mic eagle I write and record and perform rap music. I'm toy light I produce for Mike on a couple songs.

He's the kind of person where when you're just sitting at his house talking he just kind of playing beats and playing music the whole time.

And he played this track that really caught my ear and like I made him repeat it and then I made him tell me who it was and then I went on the soundcloud and it was one of Walker's tracks.

He goes into the name toy light and so when I saw that he lived in LA, I just wanted to start up to reach out.

It was really really wonderful to get that message from him. I'm really familiar with a lot of the rap stuff around LA and it's pretty small.

Yeah, it's all kind of the same family. It's all kind of connected.

Yeah, it was flattering that he liked it so much.

I think what first caught my ear about the track, I don't know a lot of like music theory terms but I feel like there was a chord progression that was really interesting.

For me to really really get ready to write a song is like I have to let the beat get me pregnant almost.

You know what I mean? I have to let the beat like live inside of me to the point where like I can recreate the beat in my head when I'm away from it over and over again.

It's about like finding a frequency and answering whatever questions is being asked you.

I can spend enough time with a beat in a few days to get that way or in this case I actually spent quite some time with it.

Hegan out with it, it was a process. It was a little longer than it usually would take me but I think that's more to do with just where I was in the album and trying to figure out a different way forward.

Yeah.

Dark comedy called is the ocean at a low because nobody seems to know when I'm joking.

For those who haven't heard me in baddest sarcasm so I work in absurdity.

I had relegated singing to hooks only in the past where this album I definitely played more with singing deliveries of rap lines and going in and out of singing, going from singing into straight rapping and back to singing even within the same song.

My relationship to singing is kind of developing over time.

Because my genre was a hack, actions cliche, melodrama falls flat.

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