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.

Dave Hale is a comedian and frontman of the band Valley Lodge. In this episode, Dave will deconstruct the Valley Lodge song Go, which you might recognize as the open credits of the HBO show last week tonight with John Oliver.

I'm Dave Hale and I have a rock band called Valley Lodge. We're a power pop band which is like, you know, it's a misnomer because power pop is neither powerful nor popular. It's all like guys who, you know, when they're in their 20s done, like sort of more like touring and had albums and videos and things like that.

So this was sort of the band that I sort of likened to like, oh, this is like our softball team. We're not going to stop rocking but like we're playing to like 15 friends at wherever.

But the one thing I was like, I hope it would be cool if we could tour Japan. That was my one thought in my head. But I made zero effort to make that happen. But one day I got an email saying like, hey, we have this Japanese label. You know, we love your record.

You know, we want to put it out over here and see if you guys want to tour over here.

The lonely planet guide to Japan has all these phrase Japanese phrases. Stuff for every situation. When we did the tour, you know, we drive from city to city in the span.

And I would sit in the back and try to learn phrases and if the tour manager that to Japanese guys that were taking us around, if they whipped their heads around and looked at me, I knew I pronounced it right because I would be saying like some inappropriate thing or whatever.

And I would memorize all these phrases and say them on stage at night. My pronunciation is totally wrong, I'm sure.

But Dori got the Goku Amai deshne. It's a cure fantastic dancer. Coco O Sawate touched me here.

What happened was Gibson guitars gave us guitars for the tour. And so we go back to drop them off at the end of the tour.

And like I remember just being like, come on, let's drop the guitars off and get out of here. And we go in the office and there's this woman who's like the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life.

And then all of a sudden I was like, we're hanging out at Gibson Tokyo all day. So the song is kind of like my fantasy staying in Japan and falling in love with this girl that probably would be really creeped out to you in this story.

There's a little lyric phrase I can tell you, a tiny insight.

Ginza is a neighborhood in Tokyo and that's where this is also sad and pathetic. I'm a grown man. That's where the Gibson offices and Tokyo.

So like through that end is a reference. But really the lyrics are all from the perspective of like a lethario with a head injury or 15 year old.

That's basically my mental capacity.

So I think that melody, like that.

It's a good example of me using way too many tracks to do one thing.

I really like to record like seven guitar parts, but they're really just one guitar part. Like I like mushy stuff. A lot of guitars and reverbs and things together for a tiny little part that knows what I'm doing.

I don't even know if it's just an even year unless they have headphones on.

Rob wanted to add some dimension to the drums with building up. So he's playing instead of the high had he's playing, you know, we hit the stand.

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