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.

My name is Ruben Nielsen. I play guitar and sing in a band called Unknown Water Orchestra.

If you have like different relationships, say if you have a bunch of people that you fall in love with in your life, and then you start to wonder whether you

are continuously in love with the same part of different people. That's to me as well.

Malti Love is about.

Malti Love is the title track from the 2015 album by Unknown Water Orchestra.

In this episode Ruben Nielsen tells the story of how he made the song with help from his brother Cody Nielsen and how it was influenced by Romeo and Juliet, Questlove and a broken synthesizer.

In it, start and skip to the land now.

Chicken one, two with your man, oh woman,

she needs to be your love.

That song my brother had a lot to do with because he was playing this chord progression.

I just started singing over what he was doing, just kind of ad-limbing.

I have this Baldwin piano in the basement, so he just played that and I just walked around in circles ad-limbing for like two or three hours.

You know, just put a mic up and I just recorded what I was ad-limbing and then we sifted through it later and then we did it again and then we sifted through again.

Because I found that the longer he played the chord progression over and over again, the more I would sing the same thing, the strongest melody would stick.

So it wasn't like I was ad-libbing different stuff every time, it was like I was slowly finding the real melody.

I believe that there s one true melody that you're mining for and it's a process of eliminating all the things that aren't that true melody.

But I never used this technique to get there before, so it was really interesting.

We recorded all the instrumental stuff and just a guide vocal with no lyrics.

It's weird because I kind of felt like I had some connection to gospel for some reason, not musically or anything like that.

It was just kind of like a vibe or something.

Do you remember that movie Romeo and Juliet? There s this kind of gospel thing with it, it has like a choir going,

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