Desk Exploder

A guided tour of the space right in front of me.

A brief preamble before I start the amble proper: I’m adding a paid subscription tier to this newsletter. There will be some exclusive extras, including a new project I’m doing with my wonderful friend Avery Trufelman, and access to chat with me and fellow subscribers directly about current obsessions in television, movies, music, books, and snacks.

In the coming months, I’ll have a lot of new work to share, and there’s nothing scarier than putting hard work out there and being met with echoing silence because the algorithm didn’t put it in front of anyone. So if you’re interested in supporting my work and connecting with me on a more regular and intimate basis, please consider subscribing at this new paid tier.

Okay, promo over! Thank you! On to the newsletter:

I got a nice surprise yesterday. TIME put out their list of the ‘100 Best Podcasts of All Time,’ and Home Cooking and Song Exploder were both on it, alongside many of my favorite podcasts.

One thing snagged my attention, like a bramble, in the lovely accompanying write-up of Song Exploder: “Often, he has his guest take him through their chosen track note by note so as not to miss any of the juicy details. While that might sound tedious, Hirway has a knack for getting even the most tight-lipped composers to open up about their creative methods…”

It was this phrase: While that might sound tedious…

Because I’m so deep inside the show, especially after so many years of working on it, I sometimes forget about how it might seem from the outside. It never occurs to me that looking closely at the details for what they reveal, what secrets they hold, could be anything but fascinating. It might come from years of watching PBS Mystery! as a kid, with my family, where my addiction to detective shows began. I love the idea that it’s possible to extract a whole hidden story from little pieces.

I love being in someone’s home, and seeing the accumulated stories that are contained there in photographs and souvenirs and tchotchkes. Those are usually curated, though, with intentionality. There are also so many stories in the mundane pieces, too.

And so, to that end – I took a photo of my desk the other day, thinking it might be useful for people who are interested in the kind of work that I do to see the tools that I use. But rather than just list the make and model of the technical gear, I thought I could give you a little tour of the desk, and tell you some of the stories these objects carry for me.

1. Dynaudio Acoustics BM5A monitors. In 2006, I had a song of mine in a commercial. It was the first real check I’d ever gotten for music, and the first time I felt like I could honestly call myself a professional. I used part of the money to buy these proper studio monitors for my home recording setup, replacing the speakers from a stereo system I’d gotten at Goodwill. They’ve accompanied me since then, through every music and podcast project I’ve made.

2. Fujifilm X-T4 camera. I was a photo major in college, and photography was a huge part of my life for a long time. It has, regrettably, diminished over the years. When we were a year or so into the pandemic, and doing public things over a web camera seemed to be a permanent state of affairs, I invested in an SLR camera that could work as a webcam, as well as let me reconnect with taking photographs.

3. Apple Studio Display. I blame/thank the high resolution of this screen for making me realize I now need reading glasses. 😩

4. RØDE NT-1 microphone. I get asked about microphones a lot by people who are interested in starting a podcast, or in upgrading their equipment. There are, frankly, a lot of great options. I like this one, because some very nice mics push my voice to sound a little muddy and bassy, but the NT-1 fits the frequency and tone my particular voice has. As with so many things, the tyranny of one’s anatomy dictates one’s options.

5. Ceramic pencil holder. If you saw my newsletter from a couple months ago, you know that I recently started making ceramics. This is entirely the fault of my wife Lindsey, who got me an intro class at the pottery studio where she makes her pieces. She’s been doing ceramics for over a decade under the name Larsen & Lund. This cup was something she made early on, and I love that I get to look at it and use it every day.

6. Rupert Neve Portico 5017. This is a little pre-amp and compressor that I got so I could record my electric bass (not pictured—it’s on the opposite wall—but made for me by my dear friend Trevor Healy of Healy Guitars).

7. UAD Teletronix LA-2A. When I record myself singing at home, I put my vocals through this tube compressor, which lends some warmth and smoothness. When Song Exploder was first starting, I got this in trade for a podcast ad. It was a good deal then, and it’s made a big difference in my recordings in the years since.

8. Native Instruments Kontrol S49 MIDI keyboard. I use this for composing MIDI parts, and I used this every day that I was writing the score for Companion. There are a bunch of knobs and sliders that probably do a lot of incredibly cool things, but I’ve never learned to use them. I just play this like a piano, and that’s honestly fine for me!

9. UAD Apollo x4. This is the audio interface where I plug in all of my mics to connect them to the computer. My friend Scott Leahy, who played guitar in The One AM Radio, worked for a while at an audio retailer. He let me use his employee discount to buy this otherwise pricey piece of equipment. Like microphones, there are a lot of audio interfaces out there and I’ve had several in the past…but when I got an Apollo, I felt like I’d finally become a grown-up audio professional.

10. Zoom H6N. This is a powerful little mobile audio recording device that you can plug up to six microphones into. When I’m conducting an interview of Song Exploder, I have to use my computer to play all the stems and tracks of music, so I’m constantly hitting play and stop during the conversation. Sometimes I have to look up lyrics, sometimes I’m getting text messages from anxious publicists. So rather than record into the computer while all that is happening, I feel safer having a machine whose only job is to record. That also means sometimes I’m talking over Zoom (the application) while recording into a Zoom (this hardware).

11. Mac Studio desktop computer. The wonderful folks at Apple lent me this computer so I could try the Apple Silicon M-series chip. It’s so fast. I also love that it fits underneath my little speaker stand. Years ago, in a brief hiatus between touring with The One AM Radio, I briefly worked as a graphic designer at Apple. Here’s my old ID.

12. Jar with dog treats. Most of the time, my dogs Watson & Ginger hang out with my wife in her office. (She also works from home.) So when they do decide to come visit me in the studio, I need to have treats handy to help convince them they really ought to prefer hanging out with me instead. So far, it hasn’t worked.

13. Postalco notebooks. Is there anything more exciting than a brand new notebook? If so, please tell me, so I can stop buying brand new notebooks. These are my favorite – featuring pressed-cotton covers, metal spiral-ring binding, and graph paper with a tiny 1mm grid. It looks and feels like a notebook used by the kind of thoughtful, organized, design-oriented person I aspire to be someday.

14. Larsen & Lund ceramic vase. More everyday beauty, courtesy of Lindsey.

15. Logitech MX mouse. Alas, one of the biggest drawbacks of my work at the computer is chronic stiffness in my wrist, arm, shoulder, neck…I’ve tried many different mice in an attempt to make things better, and this one seems to be the least worst option so far.

16. Beyerdynamic DT 770 headphones. These are the industry standard headphones for close, critical listening. They’re a real enabler when it comes to my fussy audio editing tendencies, because now I can hear every click and crackle and crinkle. If you look closely, you can see that these are hung on an iron hook that I’ve mounted to the underside of the desk. As someone who has toured a lot, and was nomadic for so many years in my 20s, there’s something very satisfying about having a place that I’ve committed to, in small ways like these. Everything has its place, and every place has its thing. The little hook, that little detail, reminds me that I’m home.

Recently, the photographer Sheva Kafai came over to take some pictures (on film) of my studio, so here’s the desk in situ.

Thank you so much for reading. I finished Dept Q recently and clearly need a new detective show. (Let’s discuss in the chat.)

Hrishikesh

PS: In podcast news, I’ve put out a couple new episodes recently:

• I spoke to actor Jason Schwartzman about the Rushmore soundtrack and how it changed his life, on Key Change. (Rushmore and its soundtrack changed my life, too.)

• The new Song Exploder episode is with Gigi Perez, whose hit “Sailor Song” is everywhere these days. She told me about how she wrote it while feeling a desperate need to connect, in the wake of losing her sister and having a crisis of faith.

And Samin and I recently added an additional San Francisco date to our live appearances together this fall, for her upcoming cookbook Good Things. We’re also coming to Boston, Austin, Houston, Dallas, and LA. You can find all the dates and tickets at hrishikesh.co/live. Get ready for eight more episodes of Home Cooking, August 29!