Radiohead‘s Ed O‘Brien on ”Escaping a Dark Knight of the Soul” to Make His Most Personal Record Yet
Radiohead guitarist and songwriter Ed O’Briend tells Broken Record’s Justin Richmond how depression, a Welsh hillside and a borrowed band of musicians turned into his second album, Blue Morpho—and why he’s still dreaming of the Radiohead album Dr. Dre never made.
For most of the last three decades, Ed O’Brien has been the musician quietly reshaping what a Radiohead song could sound like. On a new episode of Broken Record, O’Brien sat down with host Justin Richmond to discuss his second solo album, Blue Morpho—released under his own name rather than his prior “EOB” moniker—and the difficult period that produced it.
A Dark Knight of the Soul
O’Brien didn’t sugarcoat where the record began. “Sort of the first shoots of this album were really from a very dark place and I fell into this very dark depression, which I sort of reframed and it was like a dark knight of the soul,” he told Richmond. During the second COVID lockdown, O’Brien holed up alone with his guitar for three hours a day, calling it “therapy.” One of those sessions produced the cyclical riff that became “Cloak,” a song he built around the Greek myth of Theseus, the Minotaur and Ariadne’s thread. “I felt like I was in this labyrinth. I didn’t know how to get out of this place,” he said.
That same feeling runs through the album opener, “Incantations,” which O’Brien dreamt up while walking ancient trails near his home in Wales. “I felt that was healing me,” he said, likening the song to a spell cast in the Macbeth witches’ cauldron. “The earth is going to heal me.”
Borrowing a Family
Once the songs existed, O’Brien needed a band. So he borrowed one. Co-writer and producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence and the Machine) helped shape the material, much of it tracked in Epworth’s converted North London church studio, which was once owned by the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart before David Gray sold it to Epworth. For the rhythm section, O’Brien turned to singer David Okumu and effectively poached Okumu’s band, the Seven Generations, wholesale. “Finding a musical family is not easy,” O’Brien said. “I was like, okay, Dave, can you put a band together? And he said, how about the Seven Gens? I said, I’m in.” Vocalist Esca became what O’Brien called “a really important part of the whole project,” and saxophonist/flautist Shabaka Hutchings also contributed.
O’Brien said he deliberately chased the “dirt under the fingernails” type of earthy recording vibe that was so prominent in the late 1960s to early 1970s, citing In a Silent Way-era Miles Davis, Minnie Riperton and Charles Stepney’s work with Earth, Wind & Fire—a band he argued belongs in any conversation about the greatest ever, alongside Sly and the Family Stone.
Chasing 432 Hertz
O’Brien has also become an evangelist for tuning instruments to 432 Hz rather than the standardized 440 Hz, a fascination he says goes back 14 years and one he recently explored in a Rolling Stone feature alongside James Blake and Ziggy Marley. “I feel it makes the music more whole,” he told Richmond. “We are all frequencies. The future medicine will be frequential healing.”
Radiohead, Unfinished Business
The conversation wasn’t only about the new record. O’Brien recalled the sting of an early review from the British music weekly NME, which dismissed Radiohead as “a lily-livered excuse of a rock band”—a slight he said “sharpened your acting a bit.” He also revisited the band’s near-miss with DJ John Peel, who reportedly told a colleague he needed to “revisit Radiohead” after their 1997 Glastonbury set, and confessed a long-held fantasy that never came true: a Radiohead record produced by Dr. Dre. “My dream was like on Kid A… how cool would it be for Radiohead to work with Dr. Dre,” he said. “In another world, in a parallel universe, we’d have gone in and done a record with Dre.”