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 your way.

With you two sometimes I write lyrics and then we try to find the music to express those lyrics, but most of the time

it's about finding a feeling first and then trying to express that feeling. So H had this big blues riff, powerful and full of rage. It was a natural fit for me to talk about my own age.

That was Bono, lead singer of YouTube talking about the song Cedar Wood Road. It's named after the street where he grew up in Dublin.

He'll talk more about how he channeled his memories to write the lyrics for this song, but first we'll hear from the song's co-writer, The Edge. He'll detail the process of creating the track from the original demo to the final recording made with the other members of YouTube, drummer Larry Mullin Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton.

Hi, this is The Edge. You two songs can start from any kind of a beginning, a guitar part or drum part, anything really that excites us and inspires us.

So Cedar Wood Road actually started with a guitar riff that I played at home.

I thought it was pretty exciting, so I got a couple of hours free one morning and I started to try and see where this riff could go.

But the problem when you've got a riff like that is, okay, great, how does it become a song? I just thought the only thing to do is just make a scene change to get away from the riff completely.

So the next little bit of composition was the exit from the riff, which is this big kind of a num-skull exit.

And that just was like the way to create the full stop for the next sentence. At this point I'm at home, I've got GarageBand, which I use as a kind of sketchpad, and I've got a drum loop of Larry's that I'm using as a kind of backbeat.

A few years ago we figured out that I was doing all these demos with drum machines and stuff, and Larry said, well, why don't I just make you some drum loops?

And then you can kind of do whatever the hell you want with them. So Larry's been occasionally, if he felt like he'd just go into studio with an engineer.

He just played drums for three hours, and like all different tempos, different styles, whatever he was inspired to do. And then they send them to me. And it's just so great for me, you know, when I'm working on a demo, I get a Larry beat, and it's always way better than anything I could come up with.

And it sounds way better than any drum machine, so it's just a great starting point for me as a writer and a guitar player to have a great backbeat to work over.

My job is really to find a way to inspire Adam and Larry and Bono. So I don't often care to finish it out of piece fully. I just want to get something down that I think is like a great starting point. And then I know that, you know, whatever I come up with, they're going to come up with something better.

So I just need to get it going where its identity is clear and it's got some kind of vitality and point of view that's interesting.

With this demo, it was just the riff, the end of the riff, and the beginning of the verse.

So we're in the studio, I'm playing back this little demo, and clearly we need some other sections. And I just remember Bono picking up the guitar and he starts just playing this little melodic idea.

And I knew that there was something there, so I pick up the guitar as well, and so the two of us are like,

So his little motif actually becomes the intro to the song. And I'm like working on chord changes to try and tie it into what I've already written.

And what transpires is that that actually becomes the main chorus part, and we start trying to come up with the new melody ideas that could take the song to some kind of crescendo.

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