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.

This episode contains explicit language.

Sudan Archives is a singer, songwriter, producer, and violinist. She grew up in Cincinnati before moving to LA.

Her music has been called Visrally Gorgeous by the Guardian and Stunning by Pitchfork, who gave her best new music.

This September, she's releasing her second album, and one of the tracks on it is Selfish Soul.

She told me the idea for this song started when she asked her boyfriend James, who's the rapper No Can Do, to shave her head.

Cutting off her hair made her reflect on her whole hair story, from experiences she had as a kid, to the cultural and racial issues that have historically surrounded Black women's hair.

My name is Sudan Archives.

So I cut my hair on New Year's Eve, because I kind of feel like the hair holds energy.

And maybe if I cut my hair off, I can become like this brand new woman on New Year's.

I have these braids in my head, and normally when you have braids, you cut them and then you unbraid them, and then you take your hair out of it, and you take the extensions out of it.

But I am extreme. I just went for it, and I just chopped the braids off right at my head.

And I was just like looking at myself like, oh my god, I really just did that.

And then I remember unbraiding the remaining extensions, and then I was just like, James, help me cut my hair off.

And then he just shaved my whole head. I actually liked it a lot. I was like, I'm sexy.

I just couldn't go to sleep. So when I can't go to sleep, I just mess around in the studio.

I just like started with that loop, and I like built the song off of the clap.

I really wanted to make something more upbeat that you feel like move your waist to.

And then after the claps, I just added the bow done. And then I remember I really liked that, and I wanted like a response to that.

And a lot of Ethiopian and Sudanese violin traditional music. I'm super inspired by the way they arrange violin and vocals.

It's not about violins being tucked in the back on like the bridge. It's about a conversation between violin and vocals usually.

I was like, I've never heard that approach before. That's so cool. I was like, maybe I can do that because it's just me and my violin, you know.

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