Ed O'Brien on KEXP Podcasts

Evie Stokes talks to Ed O'Brien for KEXP's In Our Headphones about Blue Morpho, his second solo album, out on 22 May. It is a record about nature, and about how nature got him through depression in 2020 and most of 2021. He comes from a family of osteopaths, back to great-grandparents in America, so healing without medication was always close. He sat in the fire of it, traced it to childhood with the help of Gabor Maté's books, and kept up 20 years of self-taught meditation. “I'm a mongrel,” he says, taking a bit from this and that.

Wim Hof's cold water caught him, though he had never been good in the cold. It gave him a three-hour window each morning, with the children homeschooling and his wife working online, to sit with a guitar, and the songs came out of that with no second album in mind. Now it is the River Severn near home in Wales at any time of year, or a cold shower. Mid Wales is druid country, older than the Romans, and its woods and valleys are his cathedral.

The record was already finished when the band met to rehearse for the tour. A year before that, after six years without playing together, the band had needed two days in a rehearsal room to decide whether to do shows at all, the first time, he realised, that they had gone into a rehearsal studio without expecting to make something new. In the round he would turn to watch Phil Selway rolling round the kit on “Pyramid Song”, Jonny hunched over a riff whose name escapes him, and Thom Yorke at the piano. They could not do more than 20 shows, because it was too emotional, and he says he cried more in the eight weeks of the tour than in the previous eight years.