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Ed O'Brien releases Earth, his first album as EOB
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Photo: Eliot Lee Hazel · press photo, Nasty Little Man (EOB's publicists) for Capitol RecordsEd O'Brien's first solo album, Earth, is out today under the name EOB, on Capitol, and Polydor in Britain. Plenty of artists are moving their records back because of the pandemic; he has kept the date.
The record began in Brazil, where O'Brien took his wife and two children to live in a remote village at the turn of 2013, with no television and no internet. Life got reduced to these core constituents: family, food, and for me, music. It was the first time I'd ever got off the hamster wheel.
4 He had the songs written within about a year of coming home, and then they waited three years while Radiohead made and toured A Moon Shaped Pool. Recording began in autumn 2017 in a rented house in the Welsh countryside and went on at Flood's Assault & Battery studio in north London. Halfway through, he told GQ, it wasn't sounding right, because he was not singing his truth fully.
For most of its life the album was called The Pale Blue Dot, after Carl Sagan's phrase for the Earth seen from far away. When people asked what kind of record I was making, I would say jokingly that I was making an existential dance record.
4 He dropped the title because a film of that name was on the way and the Sagan estate might have objected. The pale blue dot being the Earth, the album became Earth.
Flood produced all nine songs and Alan Moulder mixed them. Colin Greenwood plays bass on “Brasil”, Adrian Utley of Portishead plays guitar on “Shangri-La” and “Sail On”, and Laura Marling sings on “Mass” and “Cloak of the Night”. Four of the songs were out before today: “Brasil” in December with a nine-minute science-fiction short film, “Shangri-La” with the album's announcement in February, and “Olympik” and “Cloak of the Night” this month.
Earth, tracklist
| # | Title |
|---|---|
| 1 | Shangri-La |
| 2 | Brasil |
| 3 | Deep Days |
| 4 | Long Time Coming |
| 5 | Mass |
| 6 | Banksters |
| 7 | Sail On |
| 8 | Olympik |
| 9 | Cloak of the Night |
He played the songs live for the first time at four small shows in North America in February and once in London on 7 March, before touring stopped and he recovered from an illness he believed was the virus. Of the album, he told Billboard, This is who I am; this is my truth.
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