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.

Taiman Paula is the project of Kevin Parker, a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer from Perth, Australia.

Since putting his first EP out in 2008, he's been nominated for two Grammys and one eight of Australia's ARIA awards.

Multiple Taiman Paula albums have been named Best of the Year. And as a producer, he's collaborated with Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, The Weekend, and more.

The most recent Taiman Paula album is The Slow Rush, which came out in February 2020. For this episode, Kevin chose to take part this song. It might be time.

My name is Kevin Parker. I'm from Taiman Paula. I just started working on this album and I had no idea what the album was going to sound like.

So I started working on this song and it was definitely just the creative trying whatever phase, which I think is important.

These songs were coming off the back of doing a bunch of co-labs. So this is coming when I was starting to get back into working with myself again, which was nice.

I guess, jamming with other people, there can be kind of an anxiety that it's not going anywhere. One of the reasons I like to work alone is that it doesn't matter if you spend 12 hours and get nowhere.

Which is, I have to kind of separate yourself from the end result being perfect. I remember the first kind of jam I had with myself.

I was just playing around with some chords on a keyboard. I kind of like it to be a sound I haven't used before.

I feel like it's a more fertile ground for thinking of new things, having a new sound. If you use the same sound twice, I think you gravitate to the same thing you've done before.

And then I just kind of jump on the drums, just record it over the top of that. Slowly trying to find something.

I like to think that things that I arrive at musically and sonically are so indipitous, happy accidents. And this album I wanted to allow that to happen even more.

But I like to have drums sounding good off the bat because a bad drum sound for me is just the least inspiring thing. I can't work on a song.

Even when I just record drums for messing around, it's still kind of this sound that I've dialed in.

So after this demo, I found a little bit that I liked and made that into a chorus.

And then I kind of built the song around that.

And what's funny is the final drums on the song are actually those drums from the same demo. Just chopped up and processed.

It's got a real kind of like late 90s, chopped up drum break sound, but like smashed.

Bror stem for those drums, I really dry. It's kind of funny you're switching between the two.

...