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.

Coming up next time on Song Exploder for the final episode of this first year, the National deconstruct their song Sea of Love.

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Radio Tapio.

From PRX.

Tico is the project of Scott Hanson, along with guitarist Zach Brown and drummer Rory O'Connor.

For this episode, I spoke with Scott in front of a live audience in San Francisco.

Coming up, he'll break down the title track from the 2014 Tico album Awake, including a note he misplaced,

and a vocal part you aren't really supposed to know about.

I'm Scott from Tico.

I think I was really intimidated by music, like, you know, a couple of my friends had guitars and like,

I don't know, it just seemed like you had to be the guy who had the guitar to play guitar,

or you couldn't, like, get into it.

For me, it was just like, that's not something I do. I do, you know, I was a visual artist.

But I've always had a really close relationship with technology and computers,

and so it took a piece of equipment, like a drum machine, for me to realize,

oh, this is something that, at least I can just approach this from a technical perspective,

and just learn this machine, and there isn't some attached meaning to it.

Like, oh, you have to think you're an artist, or you have to think you can do anything good with this music,

but you can actually just figure it out.

And so that was the jumping off point, though, is because once I started learning that,

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