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'Song Exploder' host Hrishikesh Hirway on making his own music again

WXPN

The act of creation is mysterious. It's why having conversations with artists is so interesting, to try to get into the how and why of the process and their music. Today, our guest is someone who gets to have that conversation from both sides. Hrishikesh Hirway is the creator and host of the award-winning podcast and now Netflix show Song Exploder.

If you've never heard it, on Song Exploder, he gets an artist to take apart a single song, breaking it down into parts. But guess what? Doing that over and over again with other artists didn't necessarily clarify things for Hirway when it came to making his own music, which he used to release mostly under the moniker The One AM Radio.

Today, Hirway talks about the period of self-doubt he went through while his podcast was becoming a hit and he explains how he emerged from that self-doubt and started creating music again. His most recent album is called In the Last Hour of Light.

Set List

  • "Stray Dogs"
  • "Big Sky"
  • "Home Movies"
  • "Charlie, Short for Charlotte"
  • "Rollercoaster"

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod.  Our digital producer is Miguel Perez. World Cafe's engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).