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.

This episode contains explicit language.

Ryan Olson is a member of the band, Polisa. Though he doesn't perform with them live,

he put the band together, produces the songs, and co-rites them. I interviewed Ryan in his bedroom studio in Minneapolis.

Coming up, he breaks down the song Smug from their 2013 album, Mishulman.

He also talks about two pieces of equipment that have helped shape the sound of Polisa,

and how he was introduced to one of them by Justin Vernon of Bonny Verr and to the other by DJ Shada.

My name is Ryan Olson, and I produce Polisa.

The rest of the band is Chris Bearden on bass, and then two drummers, Ben of Asquieu and Duke Stofferson.

Vocals is a chainy lena. I had a project called Gangs that I recruited like 25 people I knew to play soft rock basically.

Chainy was one of them. We played shows together with other bands or whatever in each other in that way.

But she asked me to do something. I had already been doing like five other projects I was working out at the time.

I wasn't really trying to start new bands, or I'm always trying to start new bands.

That's like the funnest thing to do. It's just start a band and say, all right, we need to get Ben and Drew underums.

Chris Bearden was over here playing bass on another project.

I was working on it. You want to try playing on this, and you just slated.

This might be an actual back. Normally if I have someone come over to my house and not trying to make a band for you or whatever, I'm just going to make studio stuff.

But after we got done tracking, I might have to ask you to play this live. We might have to actually do this a little bit.

I didn't know how much they were going to have to actually go out and do it.

Smug is the rare one where we were actually in Chainy Iver up here actually writing.

This is a song she had from a long time ago. I believe I'm not really sure.

So she had a keyboard part and the vocal how she wanted the song to go basically.

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