The podcast Song Exploder is great in every way — well-produced, interesting, fun, inspiring, and taste-expanding. The first few episodes made me think that I would be listening to this podcast despite the music it focused on; of the first ten episodes, only two have songs that are to my taste and at least two are about songs that I would never, ever care to hear for pleasure.

I think, however, that this might be the best quality of the podcast for me now. I started listening to Song Exploder on the recommendation of a friend who co-hosts her own podcast about music, and her taste and mine don’t exactly match up, either. (Her co-host and I have fundamentally different opinions on Radiohead, and that will be the subject of another post, another day.) I like that I’m hearing the careful explanation of how songs that sound uninteresting to me were created — it’s an ear-opener to hear the choices that the artists made and the constituent pieces of their songs. And as a bonus, the two that were about songs I liked seemed like the best ever.

I encourage you to check out Song Exploder and to start from the beginning, even if there are some artists you don’t care for. Here’s the first episode: