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.

Sarah Watkins began her music career when she was only 8 years old, as one of the founding members of the Grammy Award-winning band, Nickel Creek.

In 2016, she released her third solo album, Young in All the Wrong Ways. In this episode, Sarah breaks down her song without a word.

The interview for this episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Chicago Podcast Festival.

This song started when I was on tour with my bandmates. We were driving in England and I just remember sort of leaning against the passenger door and singing.

The song started when I was on tour with my bandmates. We were driving in England and I just remember leaning against the passenger door and singing the basic melody.

I leaned over in my phone and just recorded.

We were driving in England and I was on tour with my bandmates. We were driving in England and I was on tour with my bandmates.

Lyric started with this image of someone coming through the front door and just wreaking all kinds of havoc in the living room, twirling around like a Tasmanian devil and then out through the bedroom window and just running out of the driveway and down the street and feeling the emotional equivalent of all that.

That feeling of just what happened, how everything was fine and now there's disaster.

By the end of the tour, I had the first two verses.

I played it for my friend Gabe Witcher who produced the record. I asked him to help me finish it. I've known Gabe since I was eight.

We grew up going to Bluegrass festivals in Southern California. We last touched with each other in the teenage years but reconnected and just sent him a text out of the blue.

Hey, do you want to produce my record? And he said yes. We have a similar appreciation for really just carrying about the band performance.

You get the right people together in a room. There's nothing like it. So we made this record by performing in the studio live.

For this album I had a core band on all the songs and part of the fun was bringing these songs to life with this group of people for the first time.

Jay Belrose, he is a drummer who I feel like he somehow hitches a ride on my lungs and plays to the vocal.

Jay is really good at playing with acoustic instruments and this track is almost exclusively acoustic.

This beautiful dance between the keys and the guitar as they're sort of trading just sort of developed and it became this beautiful theme in the song.

It's kind of a lovely dance of what's happening, lyrically these two characters. It's an instrumental treatment of what the lyrics trying to sort through.

The instincts of all these musicians were pretty right on. Then I'm on Trench on Whirlitzer and Chris Eldridge playing acoustic guitar.

In addition to that band, there's a string section. I play fiddle but there's not a lot of fiddle on this record because it's a really strong character but strings.

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