Ed O'Brien on KCRW

Ed O'Brien is Novena Carmel's guest, live on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, and they start with “Obrigado”, the last track on Blue Morpho. The record came out of a dark period, and the song out of gratitude, and out of picturing the soul leaving the body and looking back at the planet. The family went out to Brazil in 2012 and lived there for six months, by a waterfall on the edge of a farm, the children aged six and eight in a village school where nobody spoke English. Britain, he says, is “so zipped up”, and Brazil started the unzipping.

Coming through the dark time he stopped listening to music altogether and heard only birdsong for weeks. Then came jazz, Coltrane, Brazilian records and classical music, among it Fauré's Requiem, which helped him through the dark time and which he had sung as a treble at a midnight, candlelit performance. At his new school he decided the choir was uncool and flunked its voice test on purpose, glad to go off and smoke cigarettes instead.

In On a Friday, he says, he was about 0.25 out of 10 as a player with the desire of a 10, while Phil Selway had drummed and sung in the coolest school band of the day, Jungle Telegraph. He was the Smiths, Jonny Greenwood the Fall, Colin Greenwood Joy Division, Selway the Beat. He and Thom Yorke bought R.E.M.'s Document in Witney on the morning it came out, and years later he cornered Peter Buck with questions about Murmur. At Jonny's 50th, standing round a fire, he finally asked Yorke how he writes, and was told to be a good librarian and keep track of his ideas. He thinks of music now as service. “I write with God, I write with spirit, I'm a vessel.”