‘Song Exploder’ host Hrishikesh Hirway on making his own music again

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.

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.