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.

Rostumbut Monglige is a songwriter, producer and composer who first rose to prominence in 2006 as one of the members of Vampire Weekend.

He's produced songs for Frank Ocean, Solange, Carly Raicheps and New York.

But his September 2017 album Half Light is his first as a solo artist.

In this episode, Rostumb breaks down his song, Bik dream.

In coming up, he explains how it was influenced in part by bands like T-Rex and Coldplay.

But Bik dream began very differently from how it ended up.

Here's Rostumb on how the song started.

Before there were any lyrics or any vocal melodies, there was a beat and a song title, a beat that I named Bik dream.

It must have been around 2007. I had just graduated from college, I think, and I was on my bike a lot.

I remember writing the verses to this song in the department that I lived in in Brooklyn Heights and I had a couple of roommates and they all worked.

And I was mostly on tour, but when I wasn't on tour, I had the whole apartment in myself.

And I would go into my friend Tim's room because his room had a huge window that faced the garden.

And I would just go in there to get a sort of change of scenery.

And it inspired me to write. So I'd just bring my laptop in and I would play the beat on loop.

And I would just sit in front of the laptop and write different, verse lyric ideas.

Bik dream, that was just a name. It was just two words that I thought had some kind of power when you put them together.

And usually when you name a beat something memorable, it tends to last.

And the song title is with us to this day.

The original beat, however, is nowhere to be found.

But it birthed the vocal melodies and the lyrics that I wrote.

I wrote most of the lyrics of the song over that original beat and then I kind of thought like,

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