Aimee Mann has been one of our greatest songwriters for decades, and so she’s a natural for Song Exploder, the podcasts where musicians pick apart their own tracks and tell us how they wrote them. Last month, Mann returned with Mental Illness, an absolutely lovely album of sad and mostly-acoustic songs. And on the latest Song Exploder, she and co-writer Jonathan Coulton tell us all about the writing of “Patient Zero,” a song that Mann wrote about meeting the actor Andrew Garfield, after he’d been in The Social Network and when he was just showing up in Hollywood. Listen to Mann’s episode below.

https://soundcloud.com/hrishihirway/song-exploder-aimee-mann

Mental Illness is out now on Mann’s own SuperEgo label.