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.

Summer Lane and Drunk Dory is a song on Weasers' 10th album, the self-titled White album, which came out on April 1st, 2016.

For this episode, I spoke to Weasers' frontman, Rivers Cuomo, at his home studio in Santa Monica.

He showed me all the different demo versions that this song went through, as he detailed his meticulous process, which includes an array of spreadsheets that uses to collect, analyze, and harvest his ideas.

My name's Rishikesh Herway. You're listening to Song Exploder.

My name is Rivers Cuomo. I play electric guitar, and I sing.

One of the first things I did was I looked in my Spotify playlist that is a collection of songs I've heard that have cool chord progressions.

I'm going to go back and basically farm those songs for cool chord progressions.

So I looked in there and there's a song called Walk Away René by the Left Bank.

And then I kind of go back and replay it like Weasers' style with my distorted guitar.

I noticed that the file name of this first demo that Rivers was playing was called Awaken Early. I asked him where that name came from.

We want the identity of the original song to be obscured, so I'm not influenced by it when I'm writing my own melody.

Yet we want the working title to resemble the original title so that if for some reason, say for example, we're on Song Exploder someday, and we want to go back and find that original song, we can kind of make it out from the working title.

We use an anagram generator online. So Walk Away René became Awaken Early.

Now, when I come back looking for a chord progression to write over some weeks later, I don't see the original name of the song, so I'm not reminded of the original tune.

All I have to listen to is my distorted guitar playing this really beautiful chord progression, and I don't remember where it came from.

And then I'll do like just vocal improvisation over the guitar chords until I come up with a cool melody, just like singing and singing and scatting and searching for a melody that makes me feel great.

You see all these walls are mirrored behind you, so I can do all these crazy poses and stuff that get in the mood.

I always have to have like all the doors sealed up. I put a do not disturb sign out there, and there's like a lot of really embarrassing stuff on those recordings.

But sometimes I feel like on a piano or a guitar, I can come up with melodies that are even a little stronger, a little more dramatic, and sometimes it's because on a piano you can play a melody that's harder to sing.

So if you hear something, you can get it out on a big octave jump on a piano or something that your vocal muscles just might be a little too lazy to think of.

I don't have a lot of facility on the piano, so I can kind of tell what melody I want to play, but I'm stumbling playing a lot of wrong notes, feeling around for it.

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