Hrishikesh Hirway’s hit podcast first saw the light of day on January 1, 2014. This year, he’s celebrating its 10th anniversary in a unique collaboration with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra – Symphony Exploder on April 5.
The popular podcast delves into the stories behind some of pop music’s favourite songs, revealing the artistic process in candid interviews with its creators, and playbacks.
Symphony Exploder will take the same lens to Igor Stravinsky’s seminal The Rite of Spring, with maestro Gustavo Gimeno diving into the music with his conductor’s understanding of the work. The unique twist will be the presence of the TSO, whose members will perform excerpts to illustrate various points, and then end the event with a full performance of The Rite of Spring.
Hirway has done many live events before, but this will be the first with live music performance.
We spoke to the musician and podcaster about Song Exploder, and Symphony Exploder.
Hrishikesh Hirway: The Interview
While the podcast was launched in 2014, the work began some time before. “I started working on the podcast as an idea back in 2013,” he recalls.
The idea arose from his own experiences as a musician. As he’d recorded and released four of his own albums, he’d been struck by the many points along the way that would prove pivotal to the finished work — ideas and inspiration moments, the stories about what happened along the way, the many random decisions that could have gone either way.
“There’s never really a chance for people to hear those ideas.”
Looking at a song’s component parts, listening to how it came together, and all the choices that were made along the way when it comes to lyrics and arrangements, reveals a great deal about the creative process.
“I started the podcast really in response to my own desire.”
He was also inspired, in part, by his college days studying art, and the process of weekly crits, where half the class would show their work, and the other half offered reactions.
“It was really exciting and interesting to me.” He recalls his fascination in the way that each classmate’s ideas were so different, and so specific to their experiences.
When he began Song Exploder, he found the experience was similar. “Everybody is thinking about music in a very different way,” he says, “… answering the question, how do you make a song? has never been answered the same way twice.”
How have the artists felt about this kind of deep dive into their process?
He says their immediate reaction is often one of gratitude and appreciation. It’s rare to have to have the chance to talk about songwriting in such detail. “A lot times, the process of making music is so instinctive — you’re not thinking about how you’re thinking about it [at the time],” he notes.
The process itself often draws out new revelations, even as playing demos and earlier versions of the song allow them to relive its whole history. t
The process of creating and producing Song Exploder has changed his own artistic practices.
“Oh yes, absolutely, in ways that I hoped for, and in some ways that I didn’t really hope for at all,” he says.
In many ways, he says the experience was like one of those Masters programs where you design your own major, creating his own curriculum that let him learn from other people’s experiences.
“I have gotten so much just from being exposed to other people’s ideas,” he says. He’s driven by curiosity, and many of his interview subjects have responded in kind. “It’s been incredibly fulfilling for me.”
Talking about the creative process has also freed him in many ways. “It’s been remarkably liberating for me as a songwriter and as an artist,” he says. He interviews people whose work and artistry he respects, and their stories of the complicated, and often haphazard, way that the final version is reached freed him. “I have had a default mode of being a perfectionist for much of my life,” he says. There’s no one perfect way to do it. “In so many cases, those origins are quite shaggy. It’s inspiring.”
10 Year Anniversary: Symphony Exploder
When he began Song Exploder, Hirway thought of it as a one-year experiment. Would it take off at all? He initial response encouraged him to go on, but he believes that if not Song Exploder, something along the same lines would have popped up on the horizon. Audiences and fans are looking for more ways to connect with the music they love.
In the last decade, there are more and more. “Since then, I feel like I have noticed a proliferation of media that allows people into the creative process.”
He notes that it’s a specific kind of education crossed with fandom. People love the music, and they want more of it, and DIY media like podcasting allows them ever more creative ways of expressing that fandom. There is also a back and forth, or a kind of trickledown that sees renewed interest in older works as a result.
Hrishikesh played drums in bands in high school, and didn’t have classical training per se. However, when he started the podcast, childhood experiences in a school concert with Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and the way the sounds portrayed the characters, stuck in his mind. “It sparked so much in my imagination,” he recalls. He calls the concept a big influence.
Symphony Exploder, going fully live, including music performance, is the realization of an idea he’d been thinking of for a while. “I had fantasized about the idea of doing something like this,” he says.
After 10 years with Song Exploder, he’s ready to branch out a little. “I think one of the things that’s really exciting for me, is that there’s enough of a foundation for the show […] that I can experiment with it, and take it to new places,” he says.
Using orchestral music allows him to pick apart the score in a ways that would prove difficult with other types of music. “What is the violin doing between bars 80 and 90?” Orchestral music performed live allows for that kind of specificity.
It was the Toronto Symphony Orchestra who reached out to the podcaster first. “When the TSO approached me about doing this event, it was already a yes before they asked.”
Using Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was incorporated in the TSO’s original proposal. It was already part of their 2023/24 season, and the piece lends itself to discussion.
“It’s a piece that provokes so many questions,” he says.
While Song Exploder reveals the songwriter’s process, Symphony Exploder will put Gustavo Gimeno’s role as the conductor and music director under the spotlight, revealing his take on the music.
“I’m really excited for it.”
- Find out more about the event, and get tickets, [HERE].
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