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 Postal Service was formed by Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbert in 2002. They lived in different cities and would mail recordings back and forth between Seattle and Los Angeles.

They only made one record, give up, but it sold over a million copies.

It's considered a landmark album for the way it combined Indy Rock and Electronic Elements.

In this episode, Jimmy Tamborello breaks down the Postal Service song, the district sleeps alone tonight.

Hi, my name is Jimmy Tamborello from the Postal Service.

Postal Service was a project that I did back in 2002-2003 with a friend Ben Gibbert, who was also the singer for Deathcap for Cutie.

This was kind of like an electronic side project we did together.

All the music that I was making back then in the early 2000s I was using, mostly one sampler slash synthesizer called the K2000 from Kurzweil.

Almost everything on the Postal Service album came out of that machine.

It comes with a lot of preset bass and pad and bell sounds and all sorts of synthesizer sounds that you can edit.

Any sound I used I would try to change it from the preset just so it would be more original.

So this is most of the synthesizer sounds that I used on district sleeps alone tonight.

My computer at the time, I think it was a Mac, like a quadra or something.

Maybe it was an old Mac. It still wasn't really powerful enough to record audio into it, so I'd mostly use it as a sequencer.

It would control the K2000 with MIDI, so I would sequence and kind of program the drum patterns in the computer.

Since this is one of the first songs that we worked on, I still had this idea that this album was going to be more experimental than it ended up being.

I think in this song, the drum programming definitely is indebted to Bjork, the homogenic.

Even though I guess it was a couple years before that, I must have still been stuck on that style of programming.

So I think when I was making this song, I was kind of imagining it as a song for Bjork.

The German label, more music, was another big influence on this song.

I think I was trying to copy Lollipuna.

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