Jason Mantzoukas & Hrishikesh Hirway on 'In the Last Hour of Light'

Listen to 'In the Last Hour of Light' here – lnk.to/inthelasthouroflight Listen to "Never Going Anywhere" here — lnk.to/nevergoinganywhere Dropbox archive of demos, photos, and more – hrishikesh.co/albumarchive I wanted to share this conversation that I had with my friend Jason Mantzoukas earlier this year. It was on stage, here in Los Angeles, at my album release show on May 14, 2026. Before playing my songs, I had this in-depth conversation with Jason about music and creativity, and my own creative process. And if you don’t already know Jason Mantzoukas, he is a comedian and actor and improviser and writer and podcast host—you might have seen him in John Wick, or The Good Place or Parks and Rec, or The League, or you might know his voice from Big Mouth—or you might know his podcast How Did This Get Made? I love talking to Jason about music and film and TV, and our conversation kind of touched on all of those things. But principally, it’s about this album that I made called In the Last Hour of Light, which is my fifth full-length, but my first one in 15 years, since before I started making Song Exploder. For more info, visit songexploder.net/jason-and-hrishikesh. https://songexploder.net/jason-and-hrishikesh

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You might have heard me say that Song Exploder is part of Radiotopia from PRX. And I wanted to explain what that means and how it connects to you. PRX is a public media nonprofit, so they're focused on supporting work that serves the public interest. And they started Radiotopia as a way to empower independent podcast makers like me. Here on Song Exploder, we try to book artists from a really wide range of music and backgrounds and ideas. And we spend a long time editing together each episode. I think that's what makes the show special. But it's not a great formula if you're trying to maximize profit. But I've been able to keep this show going despite that because of the support of Radiotopia and listeners like you. Radiotopia sells ads for the show, but those come and go.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And nothing is as reliable as the listeners who believe in what we're doing. So if you care about this show and if you care about supporting independent media, please visit radiotopia.fm/donate. You can chip in any amount that works for you. It all makes a difference. Again, it's radiotopia.fm/donate. Thank you so much.

• 1:18Speaker 01

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• 1:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  For this episode, which is a bonus episode, I wanted to share this conversation that I had with my friend Jason Mantzoukas earlier this year. It was onstage here in Los Angeles at my album release show in May 2026. Before playing my songs, I had this in-depth conversation with Jason about music and creativity and my own creative process. And if you don't already know Jason Mantzoukas, he is a comedian and actor and improviser and writer and podcast host. You might have seen him in John Wick or The Good Place or Parks and Rec or The League, or you might know his voice from Big Mouth. Or you might know his podcast, How Did This Get Made? I love talking to Jason about music and film and TV. And our conversation kind of touched on all of those things.

• 2:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But principally, it's about this album that I made called In the Last Hour Flight, which is my fifth full-length, but my first one in 15 years, since before I started making Song Exploder. If you want to listen to the album, there's a link in the show notes. So thanks for listening to this. And thanks to Dropbox for supporting the event. Here it is.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  How we doing, everybody?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  We are here to talk about, I mean, you're gonna play music. It's gonna be great. We're here to talk about your new record and how it was made. How Did This Get Made? Is the name of my podcast, which I'd just love to get. I'm doing plugs at the beginning.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  So we've been friends for years. And we get together and we talk about stuff. First of all, how are you enjoying season 21 of Taskmaster?

• 3:25Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's really good. Episode three, I think I told you so far was my favorite.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Really good all-timer. Taskmaster fans? See, these are the kind of things we talk about when we hang out. Taskmaster, the fact that we're middle-aged men who watch anime.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Because I feel like we are always talking about stuff we're listening to, stuff we're watching, stuff we're processing. But then, when you told me you had new music, that was very exciting to me. And then when you played me new music, that was even more exciting because the reality that you were making a band record was deeply exciting. Because I feel like that's newish, you know?

• 4:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I'm gonna ask a lot of process questions. How did the record come to be? How did it go? But I think what was so interesting to me, especially in that first tranche of songs that I heard, was like, this is a band record. And then talking to you about like, making it together in a room and then how different that was for you. Can you talk a little bit about like, how this record came just differently?

• 4:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, I mean, it wasn't my plan to do it that way. I recorded with a producer named Phil Weinroeb. And I went to him thinking that maybe I was gonna make a mostly solo-ish kind of record. I had recorded a bunch of stuff where I was playing all the parts. And I really loved this record that he had done with Adrienne Lenker, songs and instrumentals.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Beautiful, incredible record.

• 4:53Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Incredible, one of my all-time favorites. And that album is her. You know, she's layering some guitar parts and some vocals. But that was sort of my idea. That was a big inspiration for me. And so I went to the person who co-produced it to say like, can you help me make?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Did you have demos at that point?

• 5:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, I had demos, some of which were very fleshed out, some of which I thought might make it onto the record.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  As-is, even?

• 5:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Not as-is, but close to it. You know, like, I was open to the idea that he might say, take this part out or add this part, or, you know. I hadn't closed the book on those demos, but I felt like I'd written parts and arrangements and figured out tempos, things like that. And then he said, okay, great. We're not gonna use any of this. And

• 5:39Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 5:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  We're gonna just start over.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  I love thinking you're someplace and then someone stripping it to zero.

• 5:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I feel like that is an impactful moment to be like, wait, I'm doing this all wrong? And you want me to change it completely? Here we go.

• 5:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I was looking back the other day. And it turns out that that conversation, where he told me that was, it was the first time we'd ever spoken. It was my birthday.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 6:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And, you know, I didn't realize at the time the impact that it would have. Now I can look back and be like, wow, that was such a crazy process that began on that day. And it feels great that it was my birthday.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Was he, and yeah, because what a, what a great gift in a lot of ways, you know, to be given truly a challenge.

• 6:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  You know, and so at that point, was he like, no, I want to do this live, like, recording everybody in the same room? Because now you've shown me pictures that I'm certain people can find, if you've already put them out there, of all of you crammed into a room together recording this record. And it's awesome.

• 6:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, he, he knew right away that he was like, we're gonna do this with session musicians. And there are people who I trust. And I said, and when do I send them the demos? And he was like, you're never gonna send them the demos. They're gonna learn the songs on the day that we record them. And you'll just play them for all of us. He's like, I'm not, never gonna listen to your demos again, by the way.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Oh, that's incredible. How much time between that conversation and you being in that room in Brooklyn?

• 7:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Four months.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  During which, once a month, I would call him and be like, can we please do this a different way?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Because I don't feel like I'm constitutionally up for recording in that way.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Which you'd never done.

• 7:24Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'd never done.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Like, previous to this, you'd mostly played the instruments on your, you'd done it all yourself in a lot of ways. So this was not just different. This was foundationally different.

• 7:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, I'd never worked with a producer like this. I'd always been the producer. That was something I like, wanted to do and was excited about. But I really wanted to let somebody else have a vision for the thing. I just didn't realize how drastically different his vision would be from what I was comfortable with.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  So you arrive, and forgive me if this is like drilling down too much into it, but like, this is the kind of stuff that I'm fascinated by. You arrive, you get there. Are you meeting the musicians for the first time when you are recording?

• 8:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Almost all of them, yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Wow, that's incredible.

• 8:08Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There was only one person who I knew beforehand. We had put together a band with the idea that I was gonna be playing guitar and singing. And then when he really wouldn't budge on this idea that we would do everything live, I said, I don't know if I feel comfortable playing guitar and singing and having to get both of those right at those standards that I wanna have for the album. And he said, okay, well, we can get somebody to play your guitar parts. You know, they can just do what you would do. And so I said, well, what if we asked my friend Ken Pomeroy to come do those parts?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 8:40Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Because we had written a couple of songs together.

• 9:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'd only met her like six months earlier, but we'd become friends and I thought at least having one familiar face might help a little bit.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  And she's all over the record in such an incredible way.

• 9:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  And her presence is essential and it's really impactful. It's wonderful. Okay, so as you get into it, there's a way in which process wise, I was absolutely dumbstruck by some of the stuff that you were talking about. Like you were saying that there was a moment where you were going to a writer's retreat and you were like, oh, I'm nervous. I'm stressed. I don't know that this is going to be successful or work out, or how am I gonna, I'm nervous, I'm going to, this time will have been wasted, or something. And you ask Iron and Wine, AKA Sam Beam, for a prompt, which this blew my mind. I've never, I love this. So can you tell us, like, what was his prompt and what then happens? Just that moment of like asking someone to just,

• 10:05Speaker 02

  give me something that I can just jump from.

• 10:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I asked a few friends for prompts because I really-

• 10:13Speaker 02

  I did not get asked. I just want to say I was not asked.

• 10:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Well, I didn't want to have to explain prompts to you.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yes, so true.

• 10:24Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Sometimes you get a suggestion from outside of yourself and then you have to do something with it.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Well, I think what I love about it is like, it is an improv scene, which is like my whole thing.

• 10:36Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. Does anybody have a scene where they would like me to answer this question from?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  We just, yes, if we could just get a non-geographic location for this answer to be set in. I heard Proctologist's office.

• 10:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So, Doctor, I was worried about squandering this week. You know, for the first time, I was turning everything else off in my life and just working on songwriting, as opposed to squeezing it into the sort of nooks and crannies that I'd been doing for the last few years.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, your whole thing is English muffins. You know, it's all about the nooks and crannies. Thomas's English muffins. Yeah.

• 11:16Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. And finally, I was gonna be just writing the songs. And I knew that sometimes, you know, you set the scene to write a song or to work on music and just nothing comes. And so what would I do if I'm in the middle of this week, or even at the beginning of this week, and suddenly I can't write, or nothing's working out? So I thought, let me fill up some pages with ideas that I can turn to, even if they don't end up being songs, just like as a way to loosen my mind or something. So I reached out to a few friends and yeah, Sam was one of them. And he gave me three prompts, but the first one was kind of all I needed. He said, describe a street that you grew up on from the point of view of a stray dog.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  I love that. It was so successful and so inspiring that you finished the song before you went to the writer's retreat.

• 12:04Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  So what it was supposed to give you, you just were like, no, I guess I did it already.

• 12:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. I mean, it was so great to get a song out of it, but then I used it already by the time I got to Texas.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  That is incredible. And so from, and that's the first song on the album is called Stray Dogs.

• 12:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Sam sings on that song with you and was that how soon after he gives you the, because it sounds like that turnaround was very quick.

• 13:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Like, are you texting him like two days later to be like, yeah, man, I need you to sing on the song that is now called Stray Dogs that you basically gave me?

• 13:09Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I didn't ask him until after we were done recording.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  The original idea was that we would do any kind of overdubs or anything like that, that it would really be all live. But there were some ideas, daydreams that I had. And one of them was the idea that since the song owed such a debt to Sam Beam to begin with, wouldn't it be cool to have him sing or, you know, just do something on it to have his presence captured in that way that like codified his involvement?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  And he's great. It's great. It's so, let's just talk about collaboration. You are a generous and prolific collaborator. And that is not just in terms of these songs and this record. You are collaborative in your podcast work. You are also someone who is curious about collaborations. You've done a podcast about people collaborating on things, you know? Song Exploder is about understanding process and how people are doing it. When you are collaborating, because you're collaborating not just with the same, but with all different people, how much are you adjusting to what they're giving you versus your driving? You know what I mean? Like, how do you suss that kind of collaborative dynamic, I guess?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Because you are so good at remaining yourself in all of these things, but you're collaborating wildly with all these different people and that to me is fascinating.

• 14:28Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I think that's something that I learned in a later part of my life. My twenties, when I was really entirely focused on music, I was focused on music in a way that was kind of the opposite of collaboration, where I was trying to do everything myself, where I was like, oh, I need to write all the parts. I need to record all of them. I need to, I mean, there were other people who played with me and people who would contribute and there were people who played instruments. And certainly there were other people whose creative input was very important. But if I can do it myself, let me try and do it myself. I thought that was important artistically, that I do it all myself, that it be as pure of an expression of who I am in order for it to be, I don't know, for me to feel proud of it or something like that.

• 15:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Or it needed to just be like this really undiluted version of who I am.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  I think you and I both struggle with needing or wanting to be in control.

• 15:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yes.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  This is the, I feel like the ocean is very much about this.

• 15:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I ended up getting writer's block and starting to do other things. And I started doing podcasts for the first time and I opened things up a little bit. I think that era of my life changed because suddenly it is, at least the podcasts that I was making, they really did rely on other people. With Song Exploder, I'm telling other people's stories. And with West Wing Weekly, I was like, I needed Josh, his perspective. And with Home Cooking, it's a conduit for Samin's knowledge, Samin Nosrat's knowledge. So that was like a whole new way of making work for me. And so when it came time to make this record, it felt natural in a way, but it was new to do it in music.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Inside of Song Exploder, you're talking week to week about how people do the thing that you also do, you know? And like, when I talk to people about acting, I'm like, wait, that's what you do? Are you serious? Because I'm not doing that at all. Boy, this is crazy, you know? Like, I did a show with Merritt Weaver and I was like, I don't even know what you're doing. It's so incredible. I'm over here being an absolute joker and you are transcendent. How much of getting and gaining insight into other people's process, how much did that help unlock that writer's block? Or unlike, was it a matter of broadening your horizon to be like, oh, I need to incorporate other people? Or I need my process to be different?

• 17:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  For a long time, when I was making Song Exploder, I was not making music.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Oh, really? Not at all?

• 17:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I mean, I was making music for other people's projects. I was doing-

• 17:21Speaker 02

  TV and film scores. Yeah.

• 17:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But I wasn't writing my own songs. I wasn't working, making personal work. And I felt like I was collecting these stories and wisdom from all these artists and like disseminating it. But even though I found it fascinating, it was kind of academic because I wasn't making music. And I didn't actually even know if I would ever make music again. I didn't know if I still had it left in me.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 17:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And so it didn't really, I wasn't like, oh, and I'll use this and I'll use this. Because I was just like, I don't know. It's just like-

• 17:51Speaker 02

  You didn't have that feeling like, oh, you can do it that way?

• 17:54Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I did. I was like, that's really cool. For someone who makes music, that's really cool. But I just, I felt so detached from me.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 18:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And then when I finally did get back to making music, it was like a decade of lessons that had been stored up suddenly now hit me all at once, where I was like, oh, I can think about this. And, and I can think about working with a producer and I can think about all these different ways that people work and apply it to myself. But it took 10 years for those lessons to reach me.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  That's an incredibly long time. So are there any like specific things that you feel like moments or practices or tips or tricks or anything that you feel like you even remember now that someone said? Like, for example, and I'll give an example for me, from one of your podcasts, which is West Wing Weekly, where you guys were talking about Alison Janney's method to memorize lines.

• 18:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Which I'm just gonna very briefly tell you because it's absolutely batshit bananas. She memorizes lines by memorizing the first letter of each word in a sentence. So she only is remembering a letter and the letter reminds her of the word.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Think about that for a second.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  And now think about like how wordy West Wing is. Like, it is crazy, but that, so, and I remember you guys were talking about it, or, and then at some, some point you had her on and she talked about it.

• 19:25Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  And then I was doing some job at one point and I had some speech to give that was full of like jargon that I could, like, technical jargon that I couldn't remember. And I tried the Alice in Janney thing and it worked.

• 19:37Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Wow.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  It worked because I was like E D N F B. And I was like, that's all I have to say. I just need to remember because it just felt so technical. It wasn't emotional.

• 19:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  I found that so inspiring because I was like, oh, I'm being given access to someone else's way of doing a thing and they are elite level.

• 19:57Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  And Song Exploder is you talking to people who are elite level songwriters and musicians. So were there any things that stuck out to you or that you then have carried through now back into music making?

• 20:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, there are so many things. In one of the earliest episodes, I interviewed my friend Alex, who makes music under the name Seawolf. We were label mates and he said something about how perfect is the enemy of good, of saying, but I had never heard it before. And it really hit me.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. My therapist said something very similar to me and it like rocked me.

• 20:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  I sent myself a note. I sent myself an email with that in it and I was like, I gotta remind myself of this all the time.

• 20:41Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. I think, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But I think if I hadn't heard that, I don't know that I would have been able to make this record. It was like the fourth episode of the podcast, so 2014. It took a long time before I could actually try and apply that. Then another one that I really loved was, I did an episode with the electronic artist, John Hopkins. He had made an entire track. It's like a really cool sounding John Hopkins track. And he was like, but I didn't like it. And so then he basically like takes the entire thing and puts it through this like meat grinder of sound processing and makes this like crazy sludge out of it and then chops that up. And then that entire thing that was a whole song becomes this one little sonic layer that he then builds a song around.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 21:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And it was a lack of preciousness about a thing that he had made that he was like, oh yeah, I did this, but actually this thing's purpose was not to be a song in itself. And rather than continue making it a thing, I can use that, I can like cannibalize an idea and turn it into another idea.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And I thought that was really fascinating too, because I think a lot of times I, my inclination is to like bang my head against the wall until I can get this thing right.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Instead of just saying like, I can smoosh this up and.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  And see where it goes. I feel like similarly, I feel like it took me a long time to get comfortable with things being messy and shaggy, even though, you know, you would think my appearance would tell you that I love that. No, like I also am constantly striving for in the scripts I write or the things I do, perfection or whatever. And there's a great story about them making Full Metal Jacket and Stanley Kubrick doing take after take after take and Matthew Modine, it's his scene and he's going, I need another one, I need another one. And Stanley Kubrick is like, I've got it, don't worry. And he's like, no, I need another one. And Modine gets one and he goes, okay, that's it. That's the one. That one felt real. And Stanley Kubrick goes, I'm not going to use that one.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  I'm going to use the one I like because interesting is better than real, which I love.

• 22:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Wow.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And his pursuit of reality was in direct opposition to the interesting movie that Kubrick was making.

• 22:58Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 22:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Mustafa the poet from Toronto, he had a song that I just absolutely loved, heartbreaking song called Air Forces. And I did an episode with him. And this was another thing that I really loved, a lesson that I got where we were talking about it. And then just sort of offhandedly, he was saying that he had been writing and he had this collection of five songs besides the one that we were talking about. And I was like, oh, what were the other, what else was on your mind? What were the other songs about? And he was like, oh, this. Like, they were all about the same thing.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 23:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And I was like, oh, you could keep writing about this? He's like, yeah, because you don't know which one is going to be the better expression of this idea.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  That's fascinating. Yeah. Because if you're trying to unlock or figure out a thing, come at it from every angle.

• 23:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  And at some point, and it's almost like the John Hopkins thing, like at some point, maybe they all collapse into one song or something.

• 23:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Oh, that's great. I love them.

• 23:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So there are songs on the album where it's not the only song that I ended up writing about that thing.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  I love that. The song Swimming Pool, you were talking about how as you get older, your relationship to time is becoming very difficult. I now feel like one year to me feels like it goes by in about six months.

• 24:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Truly, like I feel like time is speeding up in a way that is terrifying. How do you feel? Because you, and you, you had a great line in something you wrote to me, which was basically like, I'm nervous that the moments that I'm experiencing right now in the present tense, I will forget in the near future.

• 24:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  And that I have also like a real kinship with of feeling like, but I wish I remembered more things. Do you feel like these songs are helping you remember?

• 24:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I don't know if they're gonna help me remember, but at least I feel like they were like little pots that I could put that feeling into. I remember getting into a fight with my dad. We were on a trip and he was just like videotaping everything on his phone. And I was like, dad, just, it's just five of us here talking. Can you just be a part of the conversation? And, you know, whatever, this idea of like living through your phone, documenting the thing instead of, instead of experiencing it. I feel like I'm so often on the side of like, put down your phone.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  I love that voice. I will say, as your voiceover mentor.

• 25:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Jason is my voiceover mentor.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yes. He's gotten parts on Bob's Burgers. It's happening. It's real. I mean, come on, that, that was, you guys just got a taste of this guy's voice work.

• 25:36Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This is a voice that I'm doing, that one.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  That's your, that's the real guy. That's the guy I know. This guy, oh, podcast machine?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  It's like when you realize that Stringer Bell Idris Elba was British.

• 25:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Little do you know that off mic, like Cockney accent.

• 25:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's just one of the many ways I'm just like Idris Elba.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  So, so much. You also are now saying you will not play James Bond.

• 26:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. So part of my life, I'm always like, put down the phone, let's experience this thing. And then an increasing part of me is saying like, I understand my dad wanting to film that moment and take a picture of every single thing because I'm worried that if I don't have the picture, it will be like it never happened, no matter how important it was in the moment.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  We're drowning in pictures of like the most mundane elements of our life and focusing so little on a singular picture from that whole trip.

• 26:38Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  You know, like when, when an entire trip just had 36 pictures, because that's the number of pictures on a roll of film or whatever, you know? Everything felt so much more meaningful because even if it was a bad picture or whatever, it's one of the only, like, the reality of like, I have so few pictures of myself until I'm in my 30s and then I have all of the pictures of myself from my 30s forward and all of the nonsense that I've done.

• 27:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  You know, but prior to that, it really is like, I can barely remember those years because I have nothing to jog it with. I have nothing. So I feel like I gotta document this so that later I can remember it, but that's not working.

• 27:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  My phone is full of just garbage.

• 27:22Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There are a couple of documents or lack of documents that were a big part of this. One is that like my mom started losing her voice when she, you know, I guess in like 2011, 2012, the symptoms started to come. And then, you know, as I was getting an iPhone for the first time and all of this access to recording all the time, my mom kind of became a diminished version of herself. So there wasn't as much to document. And the, the condition that she had also like, one of the symptoms is like she could not necessarily focus her eye contact. So, you know, trying to take a picture became difficult to just be like, look at the camera. She couldn't do it. So I feel like I have these kind of sidelong glances of her at best.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  In the last decade of her life. And I have no videos or recordings or anything like that. And so that was a big part of it, of realizing how much this relationship to time was kind of heartbreaking for me. And then there's a photo that I took of my wife, Lindsay, on our, our third date. It's like her in her apartment.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Did you take it on a phone or on a, with a proper camera?

• 28:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  With a camera. And I can look at that and I, I remember exactly how I felt in that moment because that was like the thunderbolt. Like we'd had a couple of nice dates and then that day I was like, oh, I'm done for.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I have a picture of that. Like I have the moment that I, that I felt that. And I was like, man, I wish I had something like that to remember all of these big moments.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  And, and I do feel like a lot of these songs are excavating those moments. You know, like I feel like you're talking about your mom losing her voice. And there is like in home movies, there is, for Lindsay, there is her father's voice. And I think if you can tell that story briefly, I think that is an incredibly beautiful story, not just about the home movies and getting to see and hear him, but then how that gets inserted into the song incredibly beautifully, but also how you ended up doing it in the studio, I thought was super interesting.

• 29:31Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So there's a song on the album called Home Movies. It's the last song on the album. And, you know, so many of the songs are about a relationship that I have. And this was a song about my relationship with Lindsay's father, who I never met. He passed away a couple of weeks before Lindsay and I had our first date. We have a life together and he was such a big part of her life. So naturally he sort of casts the shadow over my life, but it's like seeing the shadow without ever having seen the thing that casts the shadow. And I wanted to write about, about that idea of someone who could have such a big presence who I'd never met. And around the same time, Lindsay's family had

• 30:10Hrishikesh Hirway?

  uncovered these VHS camcorder recordings from her childhood with, and it's mostly videos of Lindsay and her brother, Brian. And so I got to see them for the first time. And it's just great to be able to see them as little kids.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 30:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  But it's also like, I'm hearing the actual voice of this person who I had kind of only understood as this nebulous idea. I've seen photos and stuff like that, but

• 30:34Speaker 02

  But voices are, there's something about voices that is so much more impactful, so much more, I don't know, there's like that, hearing that person, especially someone you've never heard, but have populated so much in your mind.

• 30:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Hearing that is exceptional.

• 30:49Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And in a lot of the videos, he's the one filming. And so you can hear him sort of like directing Brian or Lindsay to like do something. And I realized watching that, that that felt a lot like what my experience of him was. You don't see him on the screen, but his presence is clearly there. You hear his voice. You hear this sort of expression of him without like seeing the direct thing. And so I made, I wrote this song. And then when I was demoing it, I asked Lindsay if it would be okay to use some of the audio from one of the, one of the actual home movies. And she said, yes. And so this was one of the demos that was like quite produced. I thought like I had written all this stuff for it and actually like put in these things. So that one was feeling pretty done. And

• 31:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  then we tore it all back, started over when I was in the studio with Phil and all of these musicians who had never, didn't know anything about this, didn't, had never met me before.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Sure. But you sat them down, you made them watch all of Lindsay's home videos.

• 31:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  You're like, you guys gotta watch all of this.

• 31:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. I know we're on hour five, but I played them the song. We started playing it. I was like, actually, let me tell you about this song. Let me tell you what it's about, who it's about. And then I said, oh, also, I have this idea that I think I would like to do after we're done. I want to incorporate these moments from the actual video.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Like these snippets of Lindsay's dad saying something.

• 32:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, Lindsay and her dad talking to each other. Yeah. And

• 32:16Speaker 02

  And I feel like you'd talked about like the, the song wasn't quite clicking as you were doing it.

• 32:21Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, everybody was playing competently. They're all really good, but it just, it hadn't landed yet. And then I mentioned this idea, but you know, we can't do this because everything has to be live. And Phil said, do you have those, those pieces of audio? And I was like, well, I have the demo audio of it. And he's like, okay, so give me those. And he, because everything is supposed to happen live, when it came time for those moments, he just like hit play on those clips and played them through a guitar amp in the room. So we were in the middle of recording this song and we get to this first chorus and all the people who were working on the song, suddenly they hear the voice of Lindsay and her father, right as we're like about to go into the next part.

• 33:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And it completely changed everything.

• 33:44Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It's one of my favorite takes of the whole album because I could see how they responded right then and there to

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Oh, and it is like that moment, those moments in that song are, give you chills. It is so incredible to get a peek into that story, into that little bit of just those little bits of dialogue and the way it ends on him and them. And it's really, it's absolutely beautiful.

• 34:44Hrishikesh Hirway?

  More from my conversation with Jason Mantzoukas after this. Song Exploder is sponsored by Tin Can, the landline reinvented for kids. And I just got one for my niece who's 11. Tin Can is the new school way for kids to talk with their friends. It's a secure landline that lets them call all their favorite people, but with parental controls to keep them protected. No screens, no algorithms, no texting, just a phone being a phone. So I called my niece on her new Tin Can.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Hello?

• 35:14Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Hi, what do you think?

• 35:15Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 35:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What are you gonna talk about with your friends?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Star Trek.

• 35:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're gonna talk about Star Trek?

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, because that's what we're into.

• 35:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Amazing. So go to tincan.com/songexploder to get $10 off your first order. It's exclusive for Song Exploder listeners. That's tincan.com/songexploder for $10 off. And when you use that link, you're supporting the show. Again, it's tincan.com/songexploder.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Talk to you soon. Love you.

• 35:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Love you too. Bye.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  One of the other things that you sent me was a bunch of songs that you felt like were either inspiring to you or artists. You mentioned Adrian Lenker earlier from Big Thief. There was Arthur Russell was in there, but boy, was I happy to see the Innocence Mission in there. Karen Paris, one of the true, like wonderful, unique voices in music.

• 36:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There's a feeling in her voice and in their songs. It's not just the sound of her voice. It is this place that like hovers between hope and melancholy.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yes. And I feel like you write about melancholy and loneliness and certain elements that I feel like overlap. And for me are always summed up in the Joni Mitchell lyric, there is comfort in melancholy. There's something, oh, there's a baby here? Oh, that's awesome. The baby, huge fan.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Because Arthur Russell, too, very melancholy. Like, there's stuff to that.

• 36:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, so when I stumble across music that lives in that kind of in-between, it's the feeling that I want when I'm making music. And so to run across an artist like that, or songs by them, it's incredibly inspiring to know that this emotion has been captured. You know, it's like, here is that feeling. It is possible to capture it. And so that gave me something to aim for.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  I'm curious, when you-- okay, because you have this big, you know, break where you're not making music, but you're obviously like, just so ensconced in music with Song Exploder. You've got all of these people telling you how they do music, and then you start doing your thing again. Does it butt heads at all? Do you have to change what you're listening to? Or do you have to change how you're listening? Or does it change your relationship to doing Song Exploder? Because you're now making your own music and don't want to be either too influenced by this? Or is it the opposite? I'm so wide open that doing the show and listening to music is inspiring everything I'm doing. Does that make sense?

• 37:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. For a long time, I felt like Song Exploder was kind of deepening my writer's block, because I was talking to such successful musicians about their work, that I felt like, well, what's the point of me making music? It's never going to be as good as this. So much of the stuff on the show is, they're these huge hits.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. A lot of these people are massive artists who've been also around for quite a long time, some of them, yeah.

• 38:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. And I felt like it actually was getting in the way of writing things that felt real and good.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you can't be working on something with the intention being, and it will then be huge.

• 38:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Because that is almost going to guarantee it will never be.

• 38:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Right.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  You know, I think, you know, I think that so often on the show, a lot of times, people are like, I never thought that song would take off. I was shocked when people liked that song. You know, that's my song, you know? And that, I feel like, is, you know, you doing it for you, you know? And that's what I feel like this record feels like it is for you, you know? Beautifully so. Do you feel like in making this and getting back to making music, you've had like a reframing of how you approach making music?

• 39:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So, recording the album live and then releasing what was recorded live has done such a number on my brain. Working with Phil, I had an allergic reaction to the idea when he described it. And then even as we were doing it, I was just like, oh, ugh.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You know, because I know that I'm going to hear the flaws. There's a part of me that really believes in what he said, which is, think about some of your favorite records, and think about some of your favorite moments on those records. I bet there are so many records that you have where things aren't perfectly in tune, or perfectly played, or like perfectly in tempo. And I bet that you don't love them less because of that. And in fact, I bet that those are some of your favorite moments, when the weird thing happens or the note--

• 39:47Speaker 02

  That little bit of friction, that little bit of dissonance, that's something that is off.

• 39:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah. I was like, yes, I can appreciate that. I hear what you're talking about. And in Song Exploder, I'm often trying to like, push people to talk about the mistakes or the weird things that are in the recording, because it's so cool that those things exist. But to be able to turn that kind of perspective on something I made felt impossible, and felt like I was just exposing all the ways in which I'm a fraud. If I ended up publishing that stuff.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Like, for example, would you ever release demos? Or would you now, but maybe before you would not?

• 40:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I think I could release a demo if it was like, but here's the--

• 40:26Speaker 02

  But here's the polish.

• 40:27Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Isn't it cute? It's like a beautiful person being like, look how awkward I was as a teenager.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:34Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're like, I think I live with a level of cringe at myself all the time. Even right now, as I'm saying this, I'm like, how could I have done this better? If I can go, I'm going to go back and edit this.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  That's where we're different. I am crushing it.

• 40:51Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Well, you live in a world where, I mean, like, improv is all about the moment.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  The moment.

• 40:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It is so much more like this live band recording thing, where you're intentionally trying to make something that nobody could have predicted.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And will never happen.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  And truly, the most significant and important thing that you can bring to it is listening. Is, that's it.

• 41:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  It's just the ability to listen and comprehend everything other people are doing, not, I'm here saying this. I, me, me, me, me. It really is, you are really being informed by the people in the group with you, or in the scene with you, or whatever.

• 41:27Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, there's like a collision, and the best outcome is this unpredictable accident that suddenly spontaneously occurs.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Well, because, boy, you, when you start an improv scene, you're going to end up someplace nobody could have predicted. Versus if you wrote a sketch, you know exactly where we're going to end, you know? And there's something really fun about being like, when we started that job interview, I did not think we'd both end up dead. You know?

• 41:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah, yeah. And I, and as a, like, huge fan of yours and the improv stuff that you do--

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 42:03Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I love all of that stuff. I love going to improv shows, and I love seeing how the thing slowly gets built. And there's something so special about that. And yet, it's been really, really hard for me to give any version of that permission to myself. And for a long time, I just, I would do live performance because I was like, well, this is part of the job. And I love meeting people and talking to people, and I love traveling.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I love everything, except for the part where I'm actually onstage playing the songs and not doing the best job I possibly could. You know, like, there's a version of this where it's like, I got a perfect score, and I never get the perfect score. And so it's always a little bit disappointing. And I feel like I live in the disappointment part of it, as opposed to all the awesome stuff. And so I'm really trying right now to reframe my brain.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  It's expectation. It's all expectation. Because you, I feel like you have in your mind an understanding of how you think it should go, sound, feel.

• 43:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  And if it doesn't, for any number of legitimate reasons, because you're playing, yes, the same songs, but in different rooms, in different circumstances, every night, different crowds, different everything, then you can't help but judge it against each other iteration. Versus, I get onstage every night, and I'm like, who knows what's going to fucking happen?

• 43:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  And it happened tonight with you guys, and now we did it, and here we go. And it was the best version of this we did.

• 43:25Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  You know?

• 43:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  And we'll never do it again.

• 43:27Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  I mean, unless you ask me to do it again, in which case, we will do it again. But it will be completely different.

• 43:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thank you, Jason. Thank you so much.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Thank you, Rishi. Thank you, everybody.

• 43:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thanks so much for listening to this episode. And if you feel like listening to my album, again, it's called "In the Last Hour of Light." It's out under my name. And if you go to songexploder.net-album, it'll redirect you to the different streaming platforms, or you can go to the website for the record label, Keel Scales, where you can get it on vinyl or CD. And all of this stuff is on my own website, which is rishikesh.co. I'm going to go on tour again, and you can find the tour dates on there. You can also find a brand new song that I just put out, called "Never Going Anywhere."

• 44:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  After my tour ended, I went back to record some more new music with Philip Weinroeb, in the same way as the album, with everything live. And this new song is sort of a coda to the album. Also, thank you so much to Dropbox for their support for this event and my tour. On Dropbox, you can find a special archive that I made that has a lot of the material that Jason mentioned in our conversation. It has my demos, and voice memos, studio photos, and some things that inspired me as I made the album. The sort of things that I ask people to share on Song Exploder. I shared this archive via Dropbox with everyone who came to the shows. And you can find a link to it yourself at rishikesh.co-albumarchive. There's a link to that in the show notes as well.

• 44:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Learn more about how you can share your work with Dropbox at dropbox.com. Tiger Biscuit helped me put this episode together, and Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can find out more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi Keshirway. Thanks for listening.