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.

Mike Hadrius has been making music under the name Perfume Genius since 2008. In May 2017, he put out his fourth album, No Shape, to widespread critical acclaim.

In this episode, Mike breaks down the song Slip Away. I also spoke with producer Blake Mills, who also plays on the track, and recording engineer Sean Everett about the unusual way the song was recorded. Here's Perfume Genius on Song Exploder.

Every drum, every single piece that we're born from, everybody, and I'm carried by the sound.

It's Mike from Perfume Genius. Before I wrote Slip Away, I was writing very different songs for about a month. I was writing really dark, wordless chanting over drones, and they were very, kind of formless and creepy.

The last song was more of an electronic, like, exorcism singing in tongues. At least that was the stuff I enjoyed performing the most, so I thought, when I just did that for 45 minutes.

And then suddenly one day I made this song. It was the keyboard first. I had a keyboard that sounded kind of like a guitar jam.

I love the scream, but you don't really love me. I love the word that I love.

You know, I didn't have words yet. It was just a moding, but it was much popier, it had like a chorus.

And that felt more like the direction I was supposed to go in. It felt way infinitely more exciting and even strangely more uncomfortable and challenging than all the kind of creepier stuff I was making.

It wasn't purely intuitive. I thought about the chords and what chord to go to next. I thought about having a bridge and a chorus, and I used to think that those would cancel out the spirit.

If I worked too hard, I always thought the emotion would be lost. But that kind of changed for me with writing this album. I felt like it enhanced the soul of it.

The work I was putting into mapping the actual structure and arrangement out.

It's funny because the demo is called Band.mp3. Just because I wrote this imagining, this sort of like stadium anthem.

I knew eventually when it wanted to be prepared exactly like that and to have the instruments be a little more subversive than just a straight up rock cut.

But I wanted this song to sound American and I wanted the language to be mine, but be weirdly universal and like a classic American pop songway.

I kind of wanted that sort of springsteeny spirit to it. Like a lot of like rock dudes are just like, here's my big fat album. It's amazing. And then I was like, yes, it is. We love it.

They don't need to explain nobody's asking them questions about like their home life or anything. They're just like, you're a genius. We love it.

There's a specific kind of confidence to it and swagger to it that it feels far from me. So it felt kind of thrilling to steal some of it.

My producer Blake, I sent him all my demos and he sent me back pages of notes that were really thoughtful and exciting. I could just tell before we had even spoken that he understood the spirit of it.

My name is Blake Mills and I produced and performed on the perfume genius record.

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