Song Exploder's Hrishikesh Hirway on Creative Breakthroughs, Home Cooking, and His New Album

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What do a perfect cookie, your mom’s cooking, and a song you can’t stop listening to have in common? This week, I’m joined by musician Hrishikesh Hirway, creator of Song Exploder and co-host of Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat. We talk about the chole and puri he requested for every birthday, the mango pie mishap that inspired an ice cream collaboration with Salt & Straw, and why he once asked a baker to make thousands of cookies for a live audience. We also get into the complicated business of making things you care about: how interviewing successful musicians fed his own writer’s block, what brought him back to songwriting, and how he’s learning to separate the value of his work from its…