Ed O'Brien on SiriusXMU with Jenny

Ed O'Brien premieres the title track of Blue Morpho with Jenny Eliscu on SiriusXMU, on the day the album is announced for 22 May. He finished it just under a year earlier, and until it is out he never quite believes it will be. The songs began in about 2021, out of a dark period, and the healing happened in the Welsh hills where the family has a home, among the birds, in the river and the sea.

He wanted to get away from verse and chorus after listening to a lot of jazz. “Blue Morpho” is in 5/4, and he simply handed the strings to a composer he had met in Estonia, who recorded them with a chamber orchestra in Tallinn before O'Brien knew what he would do. He was thinking of how David Bowie trusted musicians to do their thing. It does not always work out, he says, and here it did.

He tried medication once and was not himself. What helped was sitting in the dark place, a luxury he knows most people with a boss and a mortgage do not have, along with cold water and nature and staying off doom-scrolling. Kit Monteith filmed a day in his life in Wales over two bleak days in January.

This is the first record under his own name. “Jenny, I'm not hiding anymore. When I went under EOB, I was hiding.” Next to the work of Thom, Jonny, Phil and Colin he had deep insecurities, and over the last five years he has stopped caring what anyone thinks.