You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.

My name is Tau Wyn.

This episode contains explicit language.

Phoebe Bridgers is a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles. In September 2017, she released her debut album, Stranger in the Alps.

One of the breakout songs from that album was Scott Street,

a song Phoebe co-wrote with her drummer Marshall Vore.

In this episode, Phoebe and Marshall break down how the song went

from an unfinished cassette recording to an acoustic demo to the finished album version.

Do you feel ashamed?

I'm Phoebe Bridgers.

This is Marshall Vore drummer of Phoebe Bridgers.

We met in late 2014.

We came fast friends, hung out every day.

We started talking about music.

I remember we were just hanging out a lot, and then you would just be having an idea or something, and you'd be like, what do you think of this? Or I would do the same thing. Like, I have this idea. What do you think of that? And it seemed like some songs ended up coming out of that together. And so we started writing a lot of songs, and this one, it's an idea that Marshall had, like, had a guitar and was sitting on Phoebe's bed playing the chords.

I had just got a cassette machine and I thought it was cool.

So there's a cassette demo. Walking Scott Street feeling like a stranger.

Open heart, open container.

I just kind of had these lyrics from my phone, which were the first opening lyrics of the song.

I first started writing those lyrics in 2014.

I was walking from my apartment to my friend's house

and I was just singing what was happening.

...