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.

Killer Mike and LP first met in 2011. They both had established rap careers,

but they entered a new era when they started making music together as run the jewels in 2013.

They've been nominated for a Grammy and they released their fourth album in June 2020.

Like all of their albums, they made it available to download for free.

In this episode, LP and Killer Mike break down the song Just, which features guest vocals

from their frequent collaborator, Zach De La Roca from Rage Against the Machine and guest vocals from

Pharrell Williams.

Here's LP, who produced the track.

We did the majority of the writing of this record at Rick Rubin's studio in Shangri-La.

We always like to kind of get out of our own spaces and come together in some other space

so that we could really get a vibe going. And by the time me and Mike get together in the studio,

I know that I have, you know, 10 or 12 things that I think might spark something creative in both

me and Mike. And sometimes it's more fleshed out, but a lot of times it's just, let me see if I can

get a big goofy grin on my partner's face by playing this little weird thing. It's really just about

getting a spark and then trying to harness it.

This one started with thinking about basing a beat around vocals, which is something that is not

something that we had done yet together on a record. And so that's kind of what led us to

experimenting with different vocals since and things, you know, and none of that felt particularly

right. And then we ended up going to somebody who had sung some backup vocals for us on some

TV performances, Nicholas Ryan Gant, who's this amazing solsinger from Brooklyn. So we kind of

...