Ed O'Brien on Alt 92.3

Earth means two things, Ed O'Brien tells Alt 92.3: the planet and the ground underfoot, with the record meant as a musical and emotional response to being alive on it now. The working title was a phrase of Carl Sagan's about how small the world looks from a distance.

“Shangri-La” he traces to the idea of a lost utopia, then brings home. There is an area of Glastonbury by that name, and what he means by it is finding a home and one's own people, a tribe.

Asked where he started, he goes back to the Police song that made a guitar seem worth picking up, and adds that he was raised on the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.

Jonny Greenwood once brought in the structure of “Weird Fishes”, and O'Brien drove back to London playing it eight times in a row before arriving at the studio to say it was the best thing he had heard in ages.