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.

The 1975 Arab band from Manchester, England made up of Maddie Healy, Adam Han, Ross Mcdonald and George Daniel.

They started playing music together in 2002 when they were teenagers.

Since then, they've released four albums, won three Brit Awards and got two Grammy nominations.

Their most recent album, Notes on a Conditional Form, came out in May 2020.

In this episode, Maddie and George break down how they made the song, The Birthday Parton.

My name's Matthew Healy.

My name's George Daniel. I guess I'm the primary producer and he is the primary songwriter.

We've been together since we were children, so we just try and support each other.

The song started in LA. I spent a lot of my 20s in LA.

Normally, either I'll start something on my laptop or Matthew will come to me with an idea and want to record it.

But this, actually, for The Birthday Parton, we were all playing and we were in together.

That was the first time in years that we'd sat down to work out the arrangement of the songs.

We don't do that when we're writing songs normally.

It was a product of something that Mattie wanted to try.

The very first thing I heard was him playing the guitar and singing on the sofa.

I like simplicity of form and conceptual ideas built on top of that.

It was an acoustic guitar, but I had the idea that I wanted to play a C-shape and have the bassline just move around that.

And then I got the guys in the room to see what it felt like.

I'm pretty sure I have recording on my phone of us kind of figuring that out.

George, you start with the drums?

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