Ed O'Brien on Beneath The Stream

Ed O'Brien talks to Colin Williams for Beneath the Stream, a podcast about the human experience of the non-human world, which opens on records and books made in retreat, Led Zeppelin III and Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago among them. O'Brien is there because Earth was written in mid Wales. Since it came out, he says, he has started to hear its flaws.

He held off any solo work while his children were small, the first born in 2004, a stretch he calls the tunnel. Living in Brazil in 2012, on the edge of the rainforest, he found himself craving wild British countryside, and within a week of getting home in June 2013 he was in the Cambrian mountains, where the writer Jay Griffiths was the one person he knew. The family rented a cottage near Rhayader on a farm by the Wye, among old oaks, and that September he went back alone for three weeks. He walked the hill at dawn, then read four or five pages of Leaves of Grass aloud by the river, half expecting a passing walker to take him for a madman.

Driving to Aberystwyth for food in a storm that December, with the demo of “Brasil” playing, he heard the place in the music. In Brazil the polyrhythms of insects in a field had made him think he had found where samba came from. When lockdown came he caught the virus and could not listen to music for about 10 weeks, apart from a Laura Marling album and a little Nick Drake. He is now building a studio in Wales, and believes the songs were already written and his job was to tune in to them.