Ed O'Brien on ABC.AU (Double J)

The King of Limbs tour ended in Melbourne in 2012, Ed O'Brien tells Zan Rowe, and six days later he was on the edge of the rainforest in Brazil with his wife and children, meaning to stay a year. There was no wifi and no phone signal, the children went to the village school, and for the first time he had hours to write. Rowe gets him to agree it was his first real break from a band that otherwise works without stopping.

He describes a stripping away and a reconnection with nature, and then a subject arriving. When friends asked what he was making he called it an existential dance record, which he admits is not accurate but points at something true, an emotional and musical response to walking around on this planet at this moment.

The birth of his first child in 2004 went off like a love bomb, he says, and forced him to deal with himself, because nothing holds up a mirror to a person's every failing like a child does. He was reading Whitman for its view of living here, and the album nearly had a different title until a film took it.