Ed O'Brien on Sopitas

Ed O'Brien answers questions from the Mexican site Sopitas about Earth in a short video with the questions cut out.

He demoed the songs in 2013 and 2014, then A Moon Shaped Pool started a Radiohead cycle, and he did not record properly until autumn 2017, with Flood and Catherine Marks producing. Omar Hakim, Nathan East and Dave Okumu played for three weeks in a house in Wales, and then in a London studio the songs were taken apart and rebuilt. Singing lead was the hardest part, since he was used to backing vocals and the truth of a song is in the vocal. Brazil gave him its old music, bossa nova, Tropicália, Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Tom Jobim, and its people, and months on the edge of the rainforest. “Olympik” was the first song recorded for Earth and the most ambitious, the heart and soul of the record. Mexico is a very emotional country, he says, so a song for it would have to be an emotional one, maybe with a guitar in it, since the guitar is central to Mexican music.