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 arcs is a new project from Dan Hourback of the Black Keys.

He started the band with some of the musicians and producers he's worked with over the years.

For this episode, Dan and his bandmates Richard Swift and Leon Michaels

break down how they made the song and put a flower in your pocket

and how its title was inspired by a three year old girl.

This is a live performance.

The bass, the guitar, the keyboard and the drums, it's live.

There's no edits. Second take.

You know, this thing just happened.

We didn't even have to think about it.

My name is Dan and I played bass and sang on this song.

I'm Richard and I play drums and some background vocals.

We produce a lot of records outside of arcs, but this was like too easy.

Like somebody has a riff and we just kind of know instantly what to do.

And that's Russ.

Yeah, Russ Paul, our friend from Natural.

He's great. He's on all those top ten hits, country hits, but he's so out there.

And he loves coming to our studio and making music with us.

Russ was on guitar, literally just started playing it.

...