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.

Wilbotler is a member of the band Arcade Fire. He also co-wrote the score for the film Her which earned him an Oscar nomination.

In March 2015, he put out his first solo album and in this episode he breaks down the song Anna from that record.

This came out of a nonsense song I was singing about my son, his name is Alvin. I always have my phone so I just made an iPhone member with it.

The record I recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, in the very top was Hendrix's Old Department. It's like recording a record in your house. It's just carpets and a piano and couches and a record player and vinyl on the walls and like a psychedelic wall painting.

I booked a week and the first four days I had Jeremy Garrett there playing drums. I had six songs and we done all of them and then I had Jeremy for another day so it was like oh we should do another song. What of these voice memos should be a song?

That one came out and I was like oh yeah that just do that over and over that melody over and over. I said just play drums like this. Boom, chah, boom, chah for let's say four minutes.

We did two takes once slightly slower than the record and then once that is the tempo of the record and we're like oh we'll use the slightly faster one.

So we did the drums in the bass.

It's a synth, it's a corg MS-20. It's a classic synth. This one you're hearing from the late 70s. I bought it before Arcade Fire Record of the suburbs so I've been playing it for a number of years now and it's kind of my default if I think of myself as a musician that is the instrument I play as the synth.

If you look at the synth it's a little horrifying because it's semi modular which means you can like patch wires from point A to point B and route it yourself and make all kinds of God awful sounds.

So it's a little intimidating looking but after playing around with it for a couple of years you figure it out.

So learning the subtleties of it takes a while but you know a moment to learn a lifetime to master.

Basically I have a concept of how I wanted to sound and then you test the sound as you're moving towards it just to leave a little bit of room for the Holy Ghost.

The goal is to find the sound you were imagining but just enough different that you're surprised by it and you're a little inspired by how it sounds.

Oh that's cool. Oh that wasn't quite what I expected and then you're excited about it. The lead is the same synth because it's the only synth I play.

And then I just put up a mic. I was like roll tape and I'm just going to figure out what the song is about.

I was like oh it can't be about Alvin that's weird. And then I thought oh Anna that also works in Little Anna and Nita.

Nita's a name and let's literally translate that to Little Anna.

It's vaguely related to Anita from West Side Story. There's a little bit of that darkness and she's like such a tough lady.

My sister-in-law was working at a bakery at the time and so she was always up at like 5-15 in the morning.

So I think there was some influence there where I was thinking of a New York character and I was like oh you always have to wake up at like 4 in the morning and go make your bagels.

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