Ed O'Brien

Earth's working title came from Carl Sagan's reflection on the photograph Voyager 1 sent back in 1990, in which the planet is a single pale point, and Ed O'Brien tells Darren Paltrowitz, for his Paltrocast, what he took from it. It is the instruction more than the melancholy, to look at the bigger picture rather than the drama of one's own life. He connects it to something that has bothered him for a decade, and puts it bluntly as a question about why we keep building aircraft carriers instead of working out how to live in some sort of harmony with the planet and with each other.

He did not plan the opening track as the opener, but once it was recorded he knew it had the right energy to pull a listener in.

He played most of the instruments himself, with the conspicuous exception of drums, which he cheerfully says he is hopeless at while claiming real competence on tambourine and shaker. Paltrowitz also asks how he came to record with the bassist Nathan East and the drummer Omar Hakim.

Working with Flood began at the gates of the school their children both attended, in 2013.