Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder videos explain creation of hit songs
In 2014, Hrishikesh Chandra Hirway began Song Exploder as a podcast series showing how musicians create songs. A year later, Bono of U2 agreed to be on the show, giving credibility to Hirway’s podcasts. Bono chats about how he and the band created “Cedarwood Road”, a song about the street in Dublin, Ireland, where he grew up.
Song Exploder, now a video series on Netflix, has over 200 episodes. Musicians include Alicia Keys on creating “3 Hour Drive”; Michael Stipe of REM on “Losing My Religion”; Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda on “Wait for It”; classical musician and cellist Yo Yo Ma; and lesser known musicians like Black Panther.
Hirway’s goal is to reveal the artistic intention: why someone decided to write a song and the problem solving involved in finishing it, he says in an interview published by Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire.
A musician makes numerous decisions, from the initial idea to the final product, any of which could shape the way the song turns out. ”When you reveal some of those decisions, you start to get a sense of what the machinery in (the musician’s) mind looks like…you get a sense of what a creative mind looks like,” Hirway says. He has a keen personal interest in the process since he is also pursuing a career as a musician.
In the Netflix series, Hirway, 41, uses a mix of interviews and behind-the-scenes footage to show the often chaotic and blind process by which hit songs are created. The second series of Song Exploder will be released on Netflix next month. The first series was released in September.
Hirway got into podcasting when his own music career did not take off. He felt a responsibility, especially to his Indian immigrant parents who imagined he had great potential that they worked so hard to nurture, he told The New York Times. He now does a wide range of work. “My whole life is side projects, cobbled together to make some kind of living,” he told Lifehacker.
In March, stuck inside due to the COVID-19 lockdown, Hirway launched Home Cooking, an hour long bi-weekly podcast series with Samin Nosrat, chef and best-selling author. They answer questions on cooking from listeners and discuss easy to prepare pasta, pizza, cucumber sandwiches, skinny chicken stew, upma and raita.
They also invite popular chefs like Nadiya Hussain, host of an upcoming BBC series and winner of the Great Britain Bake-Off. Hirway’s father Sumesh Hirway, a retired food scientist, is in some of the episodes under the name Sumesh Uncle.
Hirway writes music under the name The One AM Radio, including for Gossip Girl and other television shows and for films Our Nixon and Save the Date. He wrote the musical score for an upcoming video game The Red Lantern and the 2018 Netflix television series Everything Sucks.
He co-wrote and produced a song with singer Lin-Manuel Miranda for his The West Wing Weekly podcast. Miranda wrote the story, music and lyrics, as well as played a lead role in Hamilton. In 2016, 1he New York Broadway musical won 11 Tony awards, a Grammy and a Pulitzer prize. Tickets for the New York show, before the COVID-19 lockdown in March, ranged from $250 to $800. It has grossed over $610 million in estimated ticket sales in New York, London, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Utkarsh Amburkar lost a major role in the musical.
In 2013, Hirway founded Moors, a band with rap musician Lakeith Stanfield. He writes and produces the music. The band has recorded four albums and performed at the Sundance Film Festival and New York Town Hall, among other venues.
Hirway spends 10 to 11 hours a day in his recording studio, which is in the garage of his home in Los Angeles. He works there surrounded by a piano and guitars. Tools and equipment he uses include Google docs, Apple iPhone X and iMac Pro, he says while discussing his technical process in an interview with Lifehacker.
With no formal training in music or in music production, Hirway stumbled and learned along the way. He now takes piano lessons. He has spoken about his work at the Sydney Opera House, the Google Design Conference and Yale University.
Hirway got interested in music while at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he played drums in student rock bands and piano and drums in the high school’s jazz band. Two of his guests on Song Exploder lived in the same residence hall at Exeter, when he was there. One of his assistants is a graduate of Exeter, which is one of the top private residential schools in America .
In 1996, after high school, Hirway began studying arts at Yale University. While at Yale, he got more serious about music, touring and making records. In 2007, he decided to pursue music full time.
Hirway grew up in Peabody, Massachusetts. His father Sumesh.C.Hirway retired in 2015 as senior principal food scientist at Griffith Laboratories in Illinois. Earlier he worked at Wimmer’s Meat Products in Nebraska. Sumesh earned a Ph.D. in food science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1975, an M.S. from Oregon State University in 1968 and an M.Sc. in horticulture from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, in 1966. Hirway’s mother Kanta Hirway worked at Sears, the department store. Hirway’s parents now live in Providence, Rhode Island.
“I have this daydream,” Hirway told The New York Times, “that when I’m older I’ll just make music and narrate audiobooks.”
