Ed O'Brien on Sopitas

Ed O'Brien gives Sopitas a short account of how Earth was made. The songs were demoed in 2013 and 2014, then A Moon Shaped Pool began and the band's cycle took over, so proper recording did not start until the autumn of 2017. Flood and Catherine Marks produced, with musicians including Omar Hakim and Nathan East, starting with three weeks in a house in Wales. When the players left, the work moved to a London studio, where the songs were taken apart and rebuilt.

The hardest part, he says without hedging, was singing. He was used to backing vocals, not to carrying a lead, and the truth of a song lives in the lead vocal; if that is not right, nothing else on the record can rescue it.

On Brazil he names the music that drew him in, from bossa nova through Tropicália and the songwriters of that generation, and says the people mattered as much as the records, along with living on the edge of the rainforest.

A song for Mexico, he says, would have to be an emotional one.