Ed O'Brien on KEXP Podcasts

Evie Stokes, for KEXP's In Our Headphones, asks Ed O'Brien about Blue Morpho, his second solo record, and about the years that made it.

He is unguarded about the depression that closed in through 2020 and most of 2021. He calls it a dark night of the soul, traces its roots back to childhood, and names Gabor Mate's books as the writing that helped him understand it. His remedies were practical: 20 years of self-taught meditation, which he cheerfully calls mongrel because he takes a piece from here and a piece from there, and cold water. The Wim Hof method was everywhere at the time and it caught him, though he had never been any good in the cold. He built it up until it could reliably shift his state, and now it happens year-round in the River Severn near his home in Wales, or under a cold shower when the river is out of reach.

The record came out of the gap that opened up. The cold gave him a clear three-hour window each morning; his children were homeschooling and his wife was working online, so he sat with a guitar and played. There was no second album in mind. The songs accumulated as a response to what he was going through, which he calls the ordinary alchemy open to anyone who writes, taking the grief and the darkness and trying to spin it into something beautiful.

Nature runs through all of it, and by the end of the conversation it is closer to worship than to recreation. He calls the woods and valleys around him in mid Wales his places of worship, ancient druid country older than the Romans and Christianity, and talks about meeting Amazonian people the year before whose lives are shaped by the land they live in. He reaches for a line of Bowie's about becoming more truly oneself with age, and reads mental health as the soul flagging that something is not good for him.

The last stretch turns to Radiohead. Blue Morpho was finished a year before the rehearsals, and the band had not played together for six years, so two days in a rehearsal room had to settle whether the shows would happen at all. He describes the tour that followed as the first time they had gathered without the expectation of making something new, and the relief of it, with the material familiar and no pressure to invent. Playing in the round, he found himself turning mid-song to watch his bandmates through “Pyramid Song”, Phil Selway at the kit, Thom Yorke at the piano, Colin Greenwood on bass and Jonny hunched over a riff, and felt it more deeply than he ever had. They managed 20 shows, as many as they could do. He says he cried more in those eight weeks than in the previous eight years.