Song Exploder makes the isolated audio stems the interview — one song, layer by layer

Song Exploder began as a one-man podcast in 2014, but the idea behind it was older: Hrishikesh Hirway, a self-taught musician, was 'voracious for anything where artists would let people in on the secrets' of how they made their music. When friends like Jimmy Tamborello made songs he admired, Hirway pressed them for details — and concluded that other music obsessives would want the same access. In 2013 he took the idea to Spotify, which passed because it was focused on video.

The show's innovation was structural. Rather than a conventional interview, each episode isolates the multitrack stems of a single song — the bass line alone, the drums alone, the vocals alone — and uses each separated layer as evidence. The artist hears their own work from the inside, which unlocks memories that a general 'how did you write it' question never would. Questions begin with what is on the tape and only later move to why each choice was made.

The formula scaled. By episode 42 the show had landed U2; the guest list grew to include R.E.M., Alicia Keys, Grimes, Tame Impala, Iggy Pop and Selena Gomez. The podcast ranked among the most-consumed music shows in the medium, passed 60 million streams and downloads by 2020, and became a case study in evergreen, format-driven audio content that platforms had once dismissed.

In October 2020, Song Exploder became a Netflix docuseries. Executive produced by Hirway with Morgan Neville and Caitrin Rogers, the first season's four episodes — Alicia Keys, Lin-Manuel Miranda, R.E.M. and Ty Dolla Sign — applied the same stem-by-stem method with the added intimacy of seeing the artists react to their own isolated voices. A second season, with Dua Lipa, The Killers, Nine Inch Nails and Natalia Lafourcade, followed in December.