Song Exploder

Jack Harlow is from Louisville, Kentucky, and started performing and releasing music in 2015, when he was in high school. In 2020, he released his first album, which went double platinum. He was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Performance. He’s had multiple number one hits across his first three albums. For his fourth album, Monica, which just came out in March 2026, he switched things up dramatically. I was curious how and why—how did someone who had so much success as a rapper approach a new way of making music? So for this episode, I spoke to Jack Harlow about the song “Say Hello,” which is the closing track on Monica.For more info, visit songexploder.net/jack-harlow.

My guest today is Baz Luhrmann, the award-winning director whose films include Moulin Rouge!, Strictly Ballroom, The Great Gatsby, Elvis, and Romeo + Juliet. His newest film is EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a critically acclaimed documentary about Elvis that’s playing right now in theaters and in IMAX. Before becoming a massively successful film director, Baz began his showbiz career as an actor, and as a ballroom dancer, in Australia. His first film was Strictly Ballroom, which came out in 1992, and became one of the highest-grossing Australian films of all time. It was originally a play, and there’s a song in the film that was part of the story all the way back when it was first performed on stage. And that’s what Baz and I talked about for this episode.For more info, visit songexploder.net/baz-luhrmann.

Thompson Twins originally formed in 1977 in Sheffield, in the UK. “Hold Me Now,” their iconic hit, came out as a single in November 1983, and eventually on their 1984 album, Into the Gap. That album went to number 1 in the UK and went platinum in the US. The song spent 21 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. So for this episode, I talked to the founding member of Thompson Twins, Tom Bailey, and he told me how he and his bandmates, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway, made “Hold Me Now.”For more info, visit songexploder.net/thompson-twins.

Silvana Estrada is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Veracruz, Mexico. She won the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist in 2022, and she’s been nominated for three others, including for her song “Como Un Pájaro,” which is the song that we talked about for this episode. It’s from her second album, which came out in 2025, but she started writing the song several years before that. So we talked about all the different versions of this song, and a couple of versions of Silvana herself, that emerged throughout the process.For more info, visit songexploder.net/silvana-estrada.

This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron & Wine in the fall of 2022 about the song "Flightless Bird, American Mouth." And there are a couple of reasons. One, there’s a new Iron & Wine album that’s coming out this month, called Hen’s Teeth. And secondly, I actually have a song of my own that’s coming out today, the same day as this episode, and it features Iron & Wine on the track. It’s called “Stray Dogs,” and it’s the first song from an album that I’m releasing in April, called In The Last Hour of Light. And this Iron & Wine episode of the podcast is what actually led to our collaboration on the song. I’d been a huge fan of Iron & Wine for two decades, and this live taping, which happened in Wimberly, Texas, at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, was the first time that I got to meet Sam Beam from Iron & WineSo before we go back and listen to the episode itself, I thought it could be nice to talk to Sam about how this episode happened, and then how that led to the making of “Stray Dogs.” For more, visit songexploder.net/iron-and-wine.

The Marías is a band from Los Angeles, made up of María Zardoya, Josh Conway, Jesse Perlman, and Edward James. They released their first EPs in 2017 and 2018, and their first album in 2021. But then, as you’ll hear, there was a period of a lot of uncertainty around the band’s future. Eventually, their second album, Submarine, came out in 2024, and it was incredibly successful. Stereogum called it one of the best albums of the year, and the band was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. But all of that almost didn’t happen. I talked to María about the making of their hit song “No One Noticed.” The story’s beginning, middle, and end all took place during different eras of the band’s existence. In the middle section, when maybe they weren’t going to even be a band anymore, María enlisted the help of Grammy-nominated producer Gianluca Buccellati. And I spoke to Luca for this episode, as well.For more, visit songexploder.net/the-marias.