Ed O'Brien finishes recording his second solo album

Ed O'Brien has just finished recording his second solo album, he tells Thales de Menezes of Folha de S.Paulo. One of its songs is called “Obrigado”, because he wanted a Brazilian title. I was thinking of the blue butterflies I used to see in São Luiz do Paraitinga. I realised this song is a kind of love letter to Brazil.²

São Luiz do Paraitinga is the small town in the interior of São Paulo state where he settled with his wife and young children for a year in 2012. The first plan had been to travel all over South America, but they decided the children were better off in a small community and at school, and the family learnt Portuguese. He began writing the songs for Earth in Brazil. Back in England in 2013 he had to put them aside for a Radiohead album, and Earth came out in 2020.

The band, he tells the paper, have found takes that never made it onto Pablo Honey, and he expects something to come of them.

O'Brien is in São Paulo for SIM São Paulo, the city's international music week, where tomorrow evening he sits on the climate panel “Sem Clima, Sem Show” (No Climate, No Show) at the Memorial da América Latina, beside the Ashaninka leader Francisco Piyãko and the scientist Luciana Gatti of INPE, Brazil's space research institute.

He is not sure music can do much for the environment. He saw Live Aid in person at 17, and Band Aid and USA for Africa, he points out, did not end hunger in Africa. He calls the Trump and Bolsonaro governments ridiculous, but wonders whether a second Trump term might be hard enough to wake more people up.

His favourite Brazilian musician is Jorge Ben, and the record he singles out is Joyce Moreno's 1980 album Feminina. He calls himself a country boy, though he lives in London, with a house in the Welsh countryside. For me, trees are my cathedral; that is where I have some connection with something divine.²