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Culture & Living
Hrishikesh Hirway opens up on going behind-the-scenes with pop music royalty—from Lin-Manuel Miranda to Alicia Keys
Hrishikesh Hirway, host of Netflix’s series, Song Exploder, traces his earliest musical memories to his parents’ collection of Asha Bhosle cassettes in their Massachusetts home. “Do you know, ‘Yeh hain reshmi’?” he asks me, referring to the playback singer’s iconic seduction anthem. “It’s a little bit sad and melancholic but also kind of alluring,” he adds. “Falling in love with that song led me to the feelings I wanted for my own music.”
Speaking via video call from his recording studio in Los Angeles—a subterranean nook decked with a cello, mandolin, piano and various guitars—Hirway, frontman for the electro-pop band, The One AM Radio, admits he hasn’t made much music lately. Instead, for Song Exploder (which premiered globally in October), based on his eponymous podcast, he’s sharing the stories of pop music royalty like Alicia Keys, R.E.M., and Lin-Manuel Miranda, among others. Hirway, 42, brings a perceptive and hyper-analytical lens to an array of recognisable tunes, inviting audiences to peer at the painstaking process of song-making, pairing in-depth conversations with unvarnished recordings and montages of archival footage. In one episode, Keys shares the exhilarating account of penning “3 Hour Drive”, shortly after having her second child; Miranda reveals that “Wait for It”, from the Broadway sensation, “Hamilton”, was drafted while riding the subway to a friend’s birthday party (he hightailed it home after half a beer to finish the lyrics).
“In some ways, it feels like going to the doctor’s office, where you’re half-undressed and they’re asking you very personal questions—they write you a prescription and they leave,” says Hirway, describing the nature of his Song Exploder interviews. “The whole thing is over in like, 15 minutes and you’re like, wait, should we not be hanging out now?” he adds.
Despite occupying the same wavelength as those he features, Hirway, who has also composed scores for film and television, was reluctant to be a visible part of the Netflix series. “In my podcast, part of my job is to erase my presence as much as possible,” he says. “I was trying to make it spartan in its execution and didn’t want the criticism that I was making something as a vehicle for my own ego.” In the podcast version of Song Exploder, which Hirway launched in 2014, his meditative baritone appears sparingly, akin to an audible footnote, bookending each of the 200 episodes that spotlight everyone from U2 to Selena Gomez. But Hirway isn’t as concealed as he thinks. His artistic imprint surfaces through an undercurrent of inquisitiveness, a slick edit (many episodes are under 20 minutes long), and an unflagging commitment to an immersive listening experience. “My partner on the Netflix show, [Academy Award-winning filmmaker] Morgan Neville told me that anyone listening could feel my presence, just in the way the story was told,” Hirway says. “But I am not famous, I am not a music critic, I am not a scholar—why should they hear from me at all?” he wonders. “Suddenly, that could be a distraction from the thing I’m trying to do which is, ‘hey, listen to the story of this song’!”
On the Netflix series, Hirway is anything but a distraction, instrumental to delivering depth and nuance. His earnest questions often coax household names to unveil the unexpected subtext beneath their catchiest tracks. “I was at a point in a long-term relationship with someone, I guess, who was quite dishonest with me…I see myself as such a strong woman but there were so many moments where I found myself in positions where I didn’t even recognise myself,” divulges singer-songwriter Dua Lipa in an episode devoted to the disco-flavoured “Love Again”, from her 2020 album, “Future Nostalgia”.
“Because I don’t have a background in journalism, listening to people was built into the concept of [Song Exploder],” Hirway says. “It’s easy for me to make space for the artists and connect with them, because that’s what I wanted.” Though it was originally imagined as one of his many side gigs—“in the service of being a musician, I’m used to the idea that I’ll take all sorts of freelance jobs,” he explains—the success of the Netflix series now eclipses his own musical career. So do his growing cluster of podcasts: in addition to Song Exploder, Hirway recently co-hosted and produced Home Cooking with chef and author, Samin Nosrat, (the two help listeners with quarantine-induced kitchen conundrums) and Partners, which zones in on the bonds between noteworthy professional duos, like the co-founders of Instagram. But Hirway, who graduated as an art major from Yale University, then worked as a freelance designer before trying to go all in with his band, is hoping to refocus this year. “I’ve had this mentality for a long time that music is what I do. I fought so hard to carve out that little piece of land for myself so to be like, ‘oh, maybe I do something else,’ feels like I have to put an asterisk on what I’ve already done,” he says. “I think it’s taken over seven years to get back to a place where I can do what I was doing beforehand—I’m making the room for my own music this year,” he asserts.
The songs Hirway churns out will undoubtedly be tinged with nostalgia, a sentiment he confesses to sometimes chasing. “It’s a little funny to try and pre-anticipate that feeling,” says the artist, whose high-school obsessions included Sade and Portishead, in addition to novels by Gabriel García Márquez. “There’s some DNA that those songs and books share, the dreaminess,” he says. “Nostalgia is just an attachment to a memory and there’s a kind of sigh you give out when you’re with it,” he describes. “That feeling when you exhale in that sigh—that’s the genre, ‘sighcore’,” he concludes, laughing softly.
When Hirway turns his wistful gaze on 2020, though, it may be hard to distinguish one blurry day from the other. As a resident of Los Angeles, a city that’s been pummelled by COVID-19, he acknowledges that one of the most challenging aspects of pandemic life is the “sameyness” of it. “The reason nostalgia feels profound is because you’re attaching it to a specific experience,” he says, recalling a six-week sabbatical he took in 2005, decamping to Mumbai to stay with his uncle and cousin. “It was for the third One AM Radio album. It wasn’t like I was going to write about that experience, but I wanted to stimulate my brain, just by being in a new place,” he says. “When I listen to that music, I have my own self-triggered nostalgia for India, an India within my own lifetime. And that’s part of what motivated me to make Song Exploder—to offer artists the chance to share the moments from their life that are bundled up in their sounds.”