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.

This episode contains explicit language.

Trevor Powers has put out three records under the name Youth Lagoon.

His most recent album features this song, The Noir.

For this episode, I spoke to Trevor from his rehearsal space in Boise, Idaho.

Coming up, Trevor talks about why he intentionally put himself in an uncomfortable environment

when trying to make music, and how this song dealt with some very personal issues about self-image and self-awareness.

My name is Trevor Powers.

I go by Youth Lagoon when I make music.

I remember, you know, like being really overwhelmed about the way I had viewed myself for a really long time.

I think when we look in the mirror, we only really see what we want to see.

It's easy to focus on your strong points and get consumed with that and forget about negative areas of your life

or things that you need to work on.

It's easy to ignore the shitty parts of your life, you know, and I think writing this song was sort of my way of dealing with that.

I love the idea of incorporating voice samples, and I think that's where the song really spawned from.

I started sampling voices and stacking them and messing around with the idea of repetition and using 16th notes.

And really driving the song with that.

So throughout the song, there's the...

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to really emphasize human voices that were pitched way down or pitched way up throughout the entire track.

And use that as the glue that really holds the rhythm together.

My goal was really to make the song sound completely engulfed in voices.

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