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.

The Luminiers released their second album on April 8th, 2016.

Their first album went platinum and they spent months touring relentlessly in support of it.

That schedule took a toll on their relationship, but they ended up putting it into their songs.

In this episode, Wes and Jeremiah break down their song, Ophelia.

You'll hear their demos and a version that didn't make it to the album.

They'll explain how the final track is not just a product of what they put into it, but what they decided to leave out.

My name is Rishikesh Herway. You're listening to Song Exploder.

My name is Jeremiah Freights.

My name is Wesley Schultz and we're the Luminiers.

Ramsey, New Jersey is where we grew up.

To prepare for this podcast, I was looking through my old files and I found this file.

It was this old janky idea called Ophelia, I think hyphen Ramsey.

I can remember that moment being a Ramsey and it was really cool to find that.

Especially to hear how unpollished and there's nothing that cool about it.

There's not really much there, you know, but with me and Wes, we see these ideas and they make sense to us.

I don't know if you sent me that right away or what, but in my head when I hear it, I hear it the same way I heard it the first time,

which is, I love this, I love this, let's do this here. Can we change this? Can we shorten that?

I don't know, that's cool. There was something you did that really like, there was a little more spaced out.

But then true, okay, yeah, I think I know it was cool.

It just reminded us how much we worked on a song like this.

I mean, these songs don't come easy to us.

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