Hrishikesh Hirway is Ready to be Heard
The creator of Song Exploder on releasing an album into the attention economy
Anti-viral is presented in partnership with Sublime, a creative thinking tool and communal search engine designed to help you collect, connect, and create from what inspires you — away from infinite feeds and AI slop. Sublime is my favorite kind of business — the small kind! — and they’re building my favorite kind of tool: thoughtful, single-focused, centered around what is distinctively human.
This is the third installment of Anti-viral, a new series presented in partnership with Sublime, where I talk to creatives about the meaningful work that algorithms overlook, and what they would do more of if attention was no object.
Today I’m excited to share a conversation with singer-songwriter and podcast producer Hrishikesh Hirway. Hrishi is best known as the host of the critically acclaimed podcast and Netflix series Song Exploder, in which musicians break down how their songs are made. He also co-hosts the food podcast Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat, and The West Wing Weekly with Joshua Malina. His debut album, In The Last Hour of Light, marks his first full-length project under his own name. We talked about releasing music when you’re better known for your podcasts, whether it’s scarier to be perceived or not to be perceived, and how to discover music that moves you.
I wanted to start this conversation with a little bit of time travel, since it seems to me that your new album is in many ways about time travel. In November 2020 you were profiled in The New York Times, primarily about Song Exploder. But you spoke in that interview about how your ultimate goal was for your day job to support your music making rather than the other way around. If you can take yourself back to that time, how were you feeling about your relationship with music making?
At the time, I probably still would have introduced myself as a singer-songwriter first, but it was connected to something that was so far in my past that it was almost more like a theoretical title than a practical one. Nowadays, I feel much more connected to that most important part of my identity.
You said in that interview that compared to your other projects, when you’re working on music, it’s just a different kind of emotional response. Six years later, you’ve released your first album in 15 years. What emotional response is that evoking for you?
It’s complicated. On the positive side, I feel proud that I was able to get back to something I had thought maybe I’d lost. It took a lot of willpower and willfulness, and changing the way I thought about music and my own relationship with it.
I’m also really proud of the record itself. I think my songwriting got better. And then, being back in the practice of making music, I also got reminded of all the hard feelings that made me stop making music in the first place — the feelings that, back in 2011, made me say, “I’m going to step away from music for a while,” because it felt... I don’t know if futile is the word, but there was a sense of futility brushing around the edges. I missed so much about making music, but I also knew, going back into it, that this was part of what I was signing up for. And now it’s here.
What are you talking about specifically when you talk about those hard parts?
Whenever you put anything out into the world, you hope that it might land and connect with people. Some of that is luck, and some of that is resources. What determines whether something connects with people can feel so mysterious.
For a long time, when I stopped making music, I used to conflate how well something did with how good it was. One of the difficult things now is I really know that it’s not true. And yet there’s still this magnetic pull that idea has. So I find myself actively resisting it.
When we first spoke about you participating in this series, you immediately knew that you wanted to talk about the anxieties around garnering attention for this album. The day your album came out, you wrote in your newsletter: “If people associate me with music, it’s most likely as someone who interviews musicians about their stories, not someone with their own story, and their own music. And so I thought any flaw in the music, especially in my singing, would be obvious proof that I ought to stay on that side of the divide, and leave the music-making to others.” What’s the underlying fear beneath that anxiety?
I guess it’s a fear of not being enough. Of not measuring up, or not being worthy of a kind of love or connection that feels really meaningful to me.
What do you think is happening that might make it hard for your music to reach people?
In 2020, when that New York Times thing came out, the stuff I was working on, or posting on Instagram, would get a lot of engagement. When I announced the Netflix series, or when I was posting about Home Cooking, things would get thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. Now it’s a fraction of that.
I’m posting about my music. Every day, I’ve got something to post: here’s a new song that came out leading up to the album, here’s the story behind it, whatever. The fact that those posts seem to have so little attention paid to them has been really tricky emotionally, because it makes it feel like I’m doing something people don’t care about as much.
You get a few bits of data, and then I think it’s natural to construct an entire narrative around that data. The way my brain works is it interprets that data as: clearly, nobody cares about this stuff. It’s two things: people are less interested in this part of my life, but also people are less interested in what I’m doing in general. So it’s hard not to feel like I peaked five or six years ago, and now I’m five years past that point.
The ultimate question is whether to attribute those changes in attention to something that’s changed about the platform, or something that has changed about you that the platform can’t reconcile with what it previously knew about you.
I think there’s both a gift and a curse in some of the data that does come my way. It’s not just how many people have liked or commented on a thing. There’s also the number of people who have viewed it. And one of the frustrating things is seeing the tiny, tiny percentage of people who, in theory, follow me for a reason, who are actually even seeing it.
Last week, in one of my more despairing moments about trying to connect with people about the album, I had this fear that nobody cares, that it’s not resonating with anybody. Then somebody pointed out that a lot of people who might actually care just aren’t seeing it. It’s never reached their feed.
That helps in some ways, because it makes me feel like, okay, it’s not a referendum on the work. But it’s still depressing, because it feels like all the work I’ve put into connecting with people and building an audience there has been eroded.
It’s interesting to contrast this with the other medium you work in — podcasting — where, at least for me, I find creators that I trust and let them take me wherever they want to take me. I’m not screening each episode — I just hit play, and that allows the creator to subvert my expectations and play around with the format in a way that Spotify and Instagram might approach differently.
Podcasting is a medium that exists — or at least was distributed — through RSS. An RSS syndicated feed is mechanically the opposite of an algorithmically controlled thing. You’re going to get the next thing that comes out because you’ve subscribed, and it’s going to happen chronologically. That’s it.
It allows the subscriber to determine whether they’re going to tune in or not, but they’ve already decided they’re subscribing. It would be like if you subscribed to magazines that you get in the mail, but then the delivery person was like, “I think you’re going to like this one, so I’m going to give that one to you first. The other ones, if you want them, you can come get me and I’ll deliver them, but you’re not just going to have them.”
I keep coming back to the lyric in your track “Dark Circles:” “Careful to be who you think that they want / Careful to stay in the lines you’ve drawn... You’re far away now / Too small, too dark, circle around / All of the places you’ve found / Where your voice fades out / Til it’s far away now.” As I understand it, that song is about growing up and the experience of being perceived as an other. But when I hear “where your voice fades out,” I also think about Song Exploder, and your choice to edit your voice out of the work completely. I’m curious what your relationship is with attention and being perceived, and how that’s changed over time.
I’ve always been motivated, because of my parents, to try and do well. In my understanding of how things worked from childhood, attention and love — attention being a form of love, really — came from achievement. If you do well, people will like you more. Especially when it came to school. So that’s always what I tried to do.
I had a very sweet elementary school experience. But in middle school, like for so many people, everything changed. The whole dynamic got turned upside down, and suddenly I was very conscious of the social strata of middle school, where I fit in and where I didn’t. My best friend growing up got bullied in a way that I didn’t, even though we were a pair. I think it was because I figured out a way to conform, or not take up space, or not draw attention to myself in a negative way. That was formative.
I always wanted, with my music, to connect with and reach as many people as possible. I wasn’t actively concerned with doing X to reach the largest audience possible. I was just making the music I wanted to make, and I hoped it would land with enough people that my career would grow.
That changed around the time when I started making my living as a musician. That’s when I had a different relationship with my music: If I don’t reach enough people, it’s not just a matter of quality; it’s a matter of whether I’ll be able to have a viable career.
When I started Song Exploder, I thought of it as a side project I was doing while I figured out what was next for me with music. I’d been releasing music under the name The One AM Radio since 1999. At that point, in 2013, my only public identity had been through that music. I had faith in the concept of the show, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was doing this as a marketing vehicle for The One AM Radio. I was like, these are completely separate ideas, so I’ll use my real name. I hoped the podcast would do well because, if it did, that could be my day job while I continued making music. So that was part of the reason why I wanted to take myself out of the episodes.
Am I right that you’ve started reintroducing your voice a little bit more into the podcast? What drove that?
You’re absolutely right. Part of what drove that was the experience of making the TV version of the show. I had a pretty strong creative disagreement with my co-executive producer, Morgan Neville. I really wanted the TV show to feel as much like the podcast as possible, which in my mind meant, once again, that I wouldn’t be in it. You wouldn’t see me, you wouldn’t hear from me. I had made those choices because I thought it heightened the intimacy of the listening experience to have it feel like the artist was speaking directly to the listener.
Morgan’s take was the opposite. He said that pointing the camera at the guest and having them alone in a room talking to the camera doesn’t feel intimate or special. It feels like what all other documentaries do. He said, you might not realize it, but I’m very aware of your presence in the show — from the questions you must have asked, to the way it’s edited, to the curation of artists. So he thought what would actually be special was getting to be a fly on the wall and witness the conversations I must be having with these artists.
Eventually, that’s what we went with, and afterwards I was able to recognize certain elements of genuine human interaction between the guest and myself that would have been impossible to convey in the one-sided mode.
So, based on that TV experience, I started to be more open-minded about those moments, and about a different kind of intimacy that could exist in dialogue as opposed to monologue. Instead of cutting 100 percent of my voice out, I would cut 90 or 80 percent of my voice out. Those little moments allowed for a new kind of storytelling — something maybe less formally pure, but the story was better and the meaning was deeper. It was a relaxing of the parameters I’d set, in order to open up the possibility of intimacy existing in a different kind of way.
This is kind of an intense question, but since death has such a prominent place on this album… do you ever think at all about what your epitaph will be when you leave this world?
The second One AM Radio album, which came out in 2004, is called A Name Writ in Water. It was named after the headstone of the poet John Keats. His headstone says: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
I loved that because of the ephemeral nature that it gives death, or our lives. And what’s funny to me is that it says, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” and yet it’s carved in stone. I thought the true nature of having your name writ in water is that you accept that it’s here for a moment, and then eventually it goes away.
I want to talk about the other kind of attention, as a form of love (as you said before), or a gift. When I think of Song Exploder, I think primarily about what a gift your sustained attention is to me as a listener, but even more than that, it’s tangible that the artists feel seen and moved to be asked about their work in such a serious way. It seems ill-advised to allow corporations, primarily motivated by profit, to control the exchange of that gift of attention. When you think about the artists who have been a gift to you over the course of your life, how did you come in contact with them?
The ones where I most profoundly remember the discovery are the ones where a friend played them for me or shared their music with me.
The summer of my freshman year of college, I stayed on campus. The campus was mostly empty — just a tiny fraction of students who stayed for summer jobs. A couple of guys I knew were also left in town, and we used to hang out. They were a few years older than me, more worldly, and they felt like big brothers in a way I hadn’t had. They were in bands; one of them was interning at the Village Voice and was a music editor for the school newspaper. I remember going over to their house, and they had the biggest combined CD collection between the two of them, just a wall of their apartment full of CDs.
It was a time in my life when I felt like I had tapped into a certain part of my taste. I was discovering things I loved that were maybe one or two degrees away from the culture I had easy access to growing up. There was this incredible treasure trove. It felt like there was an infinite supply of exciting stuff, especially in music and film.
I remember the day those guys introduced me to Nick Drake. It was incredible.
Funny, I also remember the exact day I was introduced to Nick Drake.
Maybe that says something about Nick Drake. It felt like music that had been waiting for me for so long. It was such a bullseye for my particular tastes. It was like my tastes had already been formed to receive that perfectly. I didn’t have to change anything or adjust. It had just been missing.
What do you want the story to be for how people find your music?
It would be great if people could have a version of that: a caring friend who really sees them and knows them, who says, “I heard something that I think would be really meaningful to you.” Then they play them the song, and that person gets to have the feeling of, yes, I really connect with that song. It resonates with something in myself.
They also get the added bonus of having someone in their life who sees them in that way. It is another form of attention, right? Someone paid enough attention to them to say, I know who you are, and I know what your tastes are like, and I know what you would respond to. That would be the best.
Can I tell you one small, quick story?
Absolutely.
I was just texting with my friend Mike before we started talking. I played at his wedding to his wife, Kelly. For their wedding ceremony, Mike, who’s a film director, had some actor friends do dramatic readings of the first messages he and Kelly had exchanged back and forth on Friendster in 2003.
Kelly’s profile had said something about looking for book recommendations. And in Mike’s first message, he said: “Can I give you a music recommendation? You should check out The One AM Radio — it’s my friend’s music.”
So he did the thing that I’m describing: the ideal version of a share. He made that recommendation to his future wife in their first exchange, and then years later I got to play my music at their wedding.
It’s wild to care about likes on an Instagram post when stories like that happen.
Exactly.
What would an internet look like that valued that kind of attention?
There’s already so little control that you have over what your world is, what your experience is. But so much magic happens through intentional accidents: going for a walk in a new city, going to a cafe for the first time, or talking to a friend who’s going to show you something you haven’t seen or heard before.
The idea that someone has to put their thumb on the scale to create a more addictive version of that, for the sake of a constant experience that’s always entertaining, feels like a flattening out of the special moments in life. The moments that are special when you discover something are special because you’re discovering something.
You need the topography of attention — the flat moments — for the highs to feel memorable and meaningful. The idea that every time you open the app, you need to get this spike feels both disingenuous to human experience and a cheapening of the times when that’s real and genuine.
It sounds like you’re describing a song.
Yeah. It can’t all be the chorus all the time.
You can buy or stream In the Last Hour of Light on Bandcamp, or wherever you get your music.
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Thank you, Elan.
That was a really nice interview. Loved the ideas about attention at the end especially.