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.

Porter Robinson is a Grammy-nominated artist and DJ from North Carolina.

In 2014, his first album hit number one on Billboard's dance chart, and he was named MTV Use Artist of the Year and one of the top DJs in the world.

But then he got stuck. He didn't release his second album for seven years until April 2021.

In this episode, he talks about what he was grappling with for all those years and how all of it became part of his song Get Your Wish.

My name is Porter Robinson. I first started touring internationally at the ages of 18 and 19. I was just like a nerdy kid in high school and I had been making beats on the computer purely for fun with no expectation of success ever.

But Friday afternoons, I would get out of school and I would go get on a plane and I would do a show that Friday night. I do a show Saturday night at Fly Home Sunday.

And people were writing about what I was doing like the first whiffs of success that the adults are proud of you.

I would be lying if I said it didn't shape my identity in some serious ways.

I really was addicted and I was really wrapped up in the kind of sense of self-worth that I got from that.

Get Your Wish was written around this time where I was basically saying like, I'm not sure that I want to be successful at music.

I'm pretty sure that the attention that I've gotten so far has been bad for me. But I wanted to make music so badly.

It's a real place of comfort for me to just be touching an instrument because it's so much easier for me to toy around on the piano than it is for me to have a conversation with somebody.

So just a ton of my time at home is spent sitting in front of the piano and it generates a lot of ideas in the end for me.

I put on this metronome app on my phone and I placed my phone down on my piano and I just played this incredibly syncopated thing.

That was on the 15th of October 2018.

The piano where I record almost all of my demos is my mom's childhood piano that she had growing up.

And it's the first piano I ever saw in my entire life. The way that I placed my phone down onto the piano, it created this t-t-t-call.

I have probably 2,000 voice memos that begin almost identically of me putting my iPhone into this little slot on this piano.

So I hear a similar sound to that all the time, but that sound just sat perfectly over the metronome.

And just kind of became the overall groove for the whole song.

As I simplified the rhythm and simplified the chord progression into just the two chords, it felt like something that was going to be a lot of fun to write to, you know, especially with this altered voice.

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