Song Exploder - General Discussion

[Kromm]

Currently on Netflix

 

Anyone else watch? 

It's essentially the same as the podcast, but face to face and with some minor visualizations helping the concept along.  There are only 4 episodes at this point, but they're all enjoyable to some extent, even if 2 of them in my opinion are better realized than the other 2.  The real standout is the episode on REM and "Losing My Religion".  It digs deep and so fascinates.  It's more about the song than the personalities, whereas the weakness with at least 2 of the episodes is that they arguably spend a little too much time on the personalities to best fit the core concept of picking apart and explaining a SONG.  The episode on Hamilton's "Wait for It" is almost as good.  The other two, Alicia Keyes "3 Hour Drive" and Ty Dolla Sign's "L.A.", as I said, are still worthwhile viewing... they just don't feel like they focus on the musicianship as much.

[hendersonrocks]

I just watched two of them in the last few days! Wait For It and Losing My Religion. I absolutely love both songs, and while I was incredibly entranced by both episodes I am glad I watched Wait For It first because I thought the Losing My Religion episode was significantly better. Michael Stipe was just an incredible interview and the whole thing was incredibly compelling. (I'm still raw they didn't include the 90210 pop culture moment in the ways that the song had a big impact!)

Season 2 drops on December 15th, so I'm super curious to see what the next round of songs will be.

[Kromm]

15 hours ago, hendersonrocks said:

I just watched two of them in the last few days! Wait For It and Losing My Religion. I absolutely love both songs, and while I was incredibly entranced by both episodes I am glad I watched Wait For It first because I thought the Losing My Religion episode was significantly better. Michael Stipe was just an incredible interview and the whole thing was incredibly compelling. (I'm still raw they didn't include the 90210 pop culture moment in the ways that the song had a big impact!)

Season 2 drops on December 15th, so I'm super curious to see what the next round of songs will be.

I agree with your assessment.  Losing My Religion should pretty much be the template of how this show should be done.  It's not just how good Stipe is though, but the whole approach to how they broke the song down.  It shows the core concept of this show at it's best. Wait For It DOES do that too, but not as well.   The other two episodes, which I don't know if you've seen yet, are watchable TV, but they don't seem to take the mission of the show as seriously.  Or at the very least, the one with Alicia Keyes seems to be vaguely about jamming and coming up with a result (a bit unsatisfying to watch) and the Ty Dolla Sign episode doesn't really gel either.

S2 is welcome news.  I hope they churn out more than 4.  COVID shouldn't significantly hurt this show.  Admittedly there's some color in seeing the places where these songs were imagined and produced, but it's not as important as just getting as many contributors to the song as possible talking, and steering them towards the creative process, song origin and message, and musical decisions made.  The visualizations at the end aren't really necessary, but can be done as CGI or something if needed.  Both the original podcast and this video version are perfectly acceptable via Zoom, with good editing, proper interviewing and frankly... tossing out episodes where the artist didn't give the team what's really needed during the interviews.  

[Kromm]

Okay, S2 seems to be 4 more.  Dua Lipa "Love Again", The Killers "When You Were Young", Nine Inch Nails "Hurt", Natalia Lafourcade "Hasta la Raiz".   2 of those sound very interesting on the face of it, and the other 2 hopefully will surprise me.