The story behind a standout track from A Seat At The Table.

Solange is the latest guest on Song Exploder, the podcast that asks musicians to break down how they made one of their best known tracks. The Knowles sister talks about how she wrote ‘Cranes in the Sky’ with her producer Raphael Saadiq, based on a sparse “sketch” he’d put together featuring drums, bass and strings.

“I immediately had this really strong reaction. I went to my hotel room and wrote the lyrics and the melody, immediately coming up with the first four lines: “I tried to drink it away, I tried to put on in the air, I tried to dance it away, I tried to change it with hair.'”

She talks about how she wrote the track during a transitional time in her life, when she had moved back to Houston from Idaho and just signed a publishing deal as a songwriter: “There were times that I felt like, well, I’m doing what I love to do, what I’ve always wanted to why do things still feel so heavy? What is this weighing on me, what is this that I’m trying to work through?”

“The fact that the chords do stay the same rings very true to the narrative of the song, it acts as a meditation,” she adds. “I’ve had a extremely difficult relationship with meditating and trying to silence my brain, which is what so much of this song is about.”

Previous guests on the podcast include Grimes on ‘Kill V Maim’, Oneohtrix Point Never on ‘Sticky Drama’ and Kelela on ‘Rewind’.

Solange was recently interviewed by her sister Beyoncé for Interview magazine, talking about Björk and sisterhood. Spend more time behind the scenes of A Seat at the Table in Solange’s mini-doc below.