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.

You bring Hans Michaels your way, from a basement at mom.

RJD2 has been making music since 2002. His song, A Beautiful Mind, was turned into the opening credits for Mad Men.

He's a producer and beatmaker, but also a singer and songwriter. For the vocals on the song, games you can win, he tapped Cana, a Grammy nominee who Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blink.

Coming up, you'll get to hear the demo vocals that RJ originally recorded himself and sent to Cana as a guide. They've never been released.

Here's the games you can win on Song Exploder.

My name is RJCron. I make records under the moniker RJD2.

The first thing that came to mind when I pulled up this session and I started thinking about it was the drum pattern.

That's a recording of me playing in a basement. It was a pattern that I would play a lot to practice, you know, practicing drums.

The verses, they only have the hi-hat on the 1, 2, 3, 4 of the bar. It's a very simple, basic hi-hat pattern.

I know exactly where it came from because there's this drum break that Pete Rock used. The song is called Soul Brother No. 1.

The hi-hat is just doing straight quarter notes and everything kind of rotates around that.

So for whatever reason, it stuck in my head. And so I know that that drum pattern was to some degree a nod to that drum break.

So getting back to games you can win the CS80.

How a synth sounds.

Very often dictates what notes get played on it.

It's actually a very limited instrument because you could be playing, I don't want to for release or something.

And it would just sound stupid. It all depends on the patch and the sound. It's a very distinctive sounding synthesizer.

I really fell in love with it.

There's two kind of main parts to the verse. There's the bass line which is...

... followed by a very high whole note.

It's the tonal opposite of the bass line part.

...