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.

We'll go formed in 1994 and 21 years later they released their ninth album Star Wars. In this episode, Jeff Tweety, the band's singer and principal songwriter, breaks down the song magnetized.

In addition to collaborating with his five bandmates, John Stewart, Pat Sandsone, Mike Jordanson, Nell's Klein, and Glenn Cochie, it turns out Jeff Tweety makes an active effort to remove his own ego from the process of songwriting. Coming up, you'll hear why.

Most days I don't come into the studio with an idea for a song. Most days I come to the studio with this interest in discovery or idea that I can't wait to hear what's going to happen today. And I just start making sound and trying to follow where it leads without trying to lead it too much.

My ultimate goal is to get out of the way as much as possible. The joy of it is the discovery.

Periodically, I'll just have the guys that don't live here in town come in to just play around in the studio.

This was one of the sessions where Mike had come into town. We were just kind of playing around with different ideas.

And he was using that synth sound and I started to hear something melodically in what was there. Like a monotonous kind of chant or something, you know, like it's the idea.

I'll do a vocal melody based on just sounds or we call them mumble tracks. And I will sit and listen to the first line over and over and over and sketch things on my note pad and try and figure out things that have the same syllables, the same meter until I get something that's satisfying.

And then I'll sing it.

The idea is to not think too hard at that stage. Once you have translated all of the mumble tracks into a set of lyrics that are real words,

it's generally pretty jumbled and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And then there's another layer of moving things around and getting closer to some meaning.

And it's a really rewarding process for me. Maybe it's really alien to someone who really wants to come at something with a solid idea of what they want to say.

I just trust that some meaning will come out of this process and that something I want to say is going to be harder to conceal when I get my ego out of the way.

And I'm not trying to direct all meaning. Your ego isn't really that interested in what's really inside of you. Your ego is very much interested in presenting an idealized version of yourself to the world.

And vulnerability only cracks through that by accident unintentionally. When your ego is really working hard to be smart and clever and on par with your heroes musically, those are real roadblocks to discovery.

I just trust the process a lot more than I trust myself to present something honest and vulnerable and real. Your unconscious is somehow allowed some part of you to slip through.

There are a lot of jumbled lyrics, but I assure you they all end up meaning something to me. I'm sustained by a deep pull and connection to my family, to my wife. I realize we're magnetized. I don't know if I can say it anymore plainly than that, even though it sounds silly out of context.

I realize magnetized. I don't think it's necessarily about romantic love. I think it's about something stronger than that and that's family.

My name is Spencer Tweety, son of Jeff Tweedie.

Spencer, my son Spencer, did a pass after school one day of how the drums might come and go or enter and work in the context of the song.

It has a lot of Glenn in it because I've listened to Glenn's drumming since I was six years old and even taken lessons with him when I was a little kid. So probably has a lot of overlap with what Glenn does.

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