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.

This episode contains explicit language.

In 2013, war paint started working on their sophomore album.

They were treated away from their home in Los Angeles to the nearby desert oasis of Joshua Tree, California.

There, they wrote the song Love Is To Die and it was decided that it would be the single from their upcoming record.

Now, with over 6 million plays on Spotify and nearly 3 million more on YouTube, Love Is To Die is by some measures their most popular song.

Designating it as the single was a decision that was easy to make early on, but it also carried unforeseen consequences for the band.

In this episode, three of the four members of war paint break down the sounds in the song and weigh in on some of the difficulty they faced getting this track from the initial idea to the finished recording.

This war paint on song exploder.

This song actually was probably my favorite thing that we'd ever done.

It started off in my opinion in such a magical, amazing place that was written in like five minutes.

We rented a house, we rented a dome.

We set up in the living room, put our amps, mics, all of our instruments and we had a little home studio.

Basically just press record for like 12 noon and stopped record at midnight.

Hi, I'm Jenny Lee from War Paint. I play bass.

There's a chorus, just bass, chorus, pedal. That's my standard tone.

How I found chorus was my first amp that I ever got was a PVT and T150.

It was my first amp. It was when we started our band and we were playing in the garage and it had a chorus built into it.

So I always had that on. That was my sound.

And so when I stopped playing out of that amp, I missed that sound.

So I then went and bought a chorus pedal and decided that that's what I'd be using forever.

And I'm still on Mozgawa from War Paint. I played drums and drum template.

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