Jessie Reyez - Goliath

Hrishikesh Hirway· Host0:00

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 Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode contains explicit language. [gentle music] Jessie Reyez is a singer and songwriter originally from Toronto. She's won two of Canada's Juno Awards, and she's been nominated for a Grammy. In addition to writing her own music, Jessie's been a songwriter on tracks by Calvin Harris, Dua Lipa, Sam Smith, Eminem, and many others. You're probably aware that there are songwriters and producers whose names you'll find over and over again in the credits for big hits. Jessie is one of them. But for this episode, I talked to her about her own song, Goliath. And the day that she wrote that song, she happened to be in the studio with a bunch of other songwriters and producers. So I also talked to Jordan and Stephan Johnson from the production team Monsters & Strangers, and Jeff Gittleman, AKA Giddy. Between the three of them, their credits also include songs by Selena Gomez, Maroon 5, Alicia Keys, Mac Miller, and again, tons more. When a group like this gets together to write music, they don't always know if they're gonna be making a song that's gonna get recorded and released by an artist somewhere down the line, or if that song's gonna get recorded at all. But in the case of Goliath, what came out was a song that was very personal to Jessie Reyez.

Jessie Reyez· Guest1:20

When I say I love you. I mean I would pull every star from the sky, too. I'll square up with any Goliath. I'm moonwalking