Thompson Twins originally formed in 1977 in Sheffield, in the UK. “Hold Me Now,” their iconic hit, came out as a single in November 1983, and eventually on their 1984 album, Into the Gap. That album went to number 1 in the UK and went platinum in the US. The song spent 21 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. So for this episode, I talked to the founding member of Thompson Twins, Tom Bailey, and he told me how he and his bandmates, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway, made “Hold Me Now.”

For more info, visit songexploder.net/thompson-twins.

Silvana Estrada is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Veracruz, Mexico. She won the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist in 2022, and she’s been nominated for three others, including for her song “Como Un Pájaro,” which is the song that we talked about for this episode. It’s from her second album, which came out in 2025, but she started writing the song several years before that. So we talked about all the different versions of this song, and a couple of versions of Silvana herself, that emerged throughout the process.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/silvana-estrada.

This week, I wanted to go back and revisit the episode that I made with Iron & Wine in the fall of 2022 about the song "Flightless Bird, American Mouth." And there are a couple of reasons. One, there’s a new Iron & Wine album that’s coming out this month, called Hen’s Teeth. And secondly, I actually have a song of my own that’s coming out today, the same day as this episode, and it features Iron & Wine on the track. It’s called “Stray Dogs,” and it’s the first song from an album that I’m releasing in April, called In The Last Hour of Light. And this Iron & Wine episode of the podcast is what actually led to our collaboration on the song.

I’d been a huge fan of Iron & Wine for two decades, and this live taping, which happened in Wimberly, Texas, at the Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio, was the first time that I got to meet Sam Beam from Iron & Wine

So before we go back and listen to the episode itself, I thought it could be nice to talk to Sam about how this episode happened, and then how that led to the making of “Stray Dogs.”

For more, visit songexploder.net/iron-and-wine.