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.

In this episode, Alex Brown Church of Sea Wolf breaks down Casper, a song from the album Old World Romance.

He talks about his songwriting process, collaborating with his bandmates, and the evolution that comes with learning the difference between making something that's good and making something that's perfect.

I think this guy is going to clear, because he'll still be in his summer days.

But a lot, man, storm, a lot, man, storm. He even had me in his warm and I could hear that nothing coming out to me.

I'm Alex Brown Church from the band Sea Wolf. Today we're going to listen to Casper, which is from the latest Sea Wolf album Old World Romance.

That came out in September of 2012. Traditionally, I sort of just sat down with acoustic guitar and come up with ideas until something clicked with me and then I would just stick with it until it became a song.

But this time, I wanted to be a lot more productive. I just wanted to have a lot more songs to choose from at the end. I would just record as many ideas as I could in a day on my iPhone.

And then every few weeks, I'd go back and listen to those recordings and then whatever jumped out at me, that's what I would kind of set aside to be a song that I would end up working on.

So a lot of this record, I used my Martin.

And I would send it through a Fender Twin Reverb amp and just, you know, mic it and then also have the amp in another room and mic the amp as well and kind of blend the two.

I sort of wanted to like pull back on the folk influences for this album. That's part of the reason why I chose to go with a sort of non-traditional acoustic guitar sound on some of the songs.

I wanted to change up what I normally do, which is right with an acoustic guitar. And I just felt like I'd kind of developed a sort of thing that was sort of my default in terms of rhythms and like a style of song.

So C Wolf drummer Joey Fickin let me this Oberheim DX drum machine, which is an old drum machine from the 80s. He was like, oh, I have just the thing, it's under my bed.

But I'm definitely not a drummer and like, and why sit down and program beats. I don't think as a drummer would think, you know, I don't think is this something that's real that would be playable at all.

Yeah, this one's kind of not humiliately possible. Although Joey is like pretty amazing at like getting it very close.

The live drums were essentially just to kind of double the drum machine.

It took me a little while to get the vocal melody for the verse down and the vocal melody that I came up with for some reason, I just wasn't that impressed with it. I just didn't think it was that cool.

Eventually, I just thought like, okay, forget it. I'm just going to write words, I'm going to record it and then I'm just going to forget about it and move on.

I kind of got frustrated with it and I felt like I didn't want to, I didn't want to like beat it into the ground. So I felt like I'm just captured what I have now.

So I did and like two weeks later it came back and listened to the song.

I don't know, it came out sounding almost like somebody else had written the song and the significant thing is that this was the second song I wrote for this record.

...