ED O’BRIEN – Blue Morpho – LP – Gatefold Orange Vinyl [MAY 22]

LP – Indies Exclusive Limited Edition ‘Metamorphosis’ Edition Orange Vinyl housed in a Gatefold Sleeve.

Ed O’Brien, the acclaimed guitarist and singer-songwriter known for his role in Radiohead, announces Blue Morpho, his absorbing, second solo album and first under his own name Named for the iridescent butterfly, Blue Morpho was written during lockdown and recorded at The Church Studio, London and Seven Sound in Wales. The tranquil Welsh countryside proved inspirational, capturing a sense of reflection, healing, and acceptance.

Ed OBrien likes to quote a line from the great Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry: To know the dark, go dark. It is the insight, after all, that ultimately led OBrien from one of the darkest spans of his life to Blue Morpho, his absorbing second solo album. To wit, as soon as OBriens solo debut was out, he heard its faults. That was April 2020, the month OBrien turned 52 and the month the world began to reckon truly with what it meant to be shut down. OBrien regretted that hed waited so long to record those songs, putting them on pause for the better part of a decade to accommodate the schedule of his teenage band, Radiohead. Some of its impulses had been lost in the gap, and there was only so much he could do to support his first albumEarth, released under his initials, EOBas the world confronted catastrophe.

And then fall began to give way to winter, and OBrien stumbled into the deepest hole of a depression that he had ever known. Late in 2020, as new waves of lockdowns roared, he found himself barely able to function. His wife, Suzi, encouraged him to sit in the fire of these feelings, reminding him that the only way out was through. During his very dark year, OBrien would wake up and shock his system with the teachings of Wim Hof, the Dutch athlete-cum-philosopher who employs deep breathing and shallow tubs of cold water to induce focus. As his kids attended virtual school in the neighboring rooms, OBrien would lock himself in his tiny London studio with his guitar and play until his brain began to fray around lunchtime.

There were no directions and no preconceptions; OBrien was simply using his instrument to navigate 50 years of emotional trauma and turmoil that had finally rushed to the surface, the lifelong dam having broken at last. Years ago, when OBrien began writing songs, Thom Yorke had told him that a secret key to the craft was being a good librariancataloguing ideas when they happened, finding them later to revisit. As OBrien played now through his past, his spiritual connection to nature, and his beliefs in the possibility of healing, he kept a record of what he was making. Over the next four years, those moments evolved into the stunning seven tracks of Blue Morpho. It is his first album fully under his own name and, too, his first album that is fully detached from past regrets. OBrien is, instead, now motivated by accepting the present and whatever it has brought, whatever it may still bring.

A dozen years ago, when OBrien and his young family were living in Brazil, he began to crave the British countryside, with its lush glades, pleasant hills, and supple rivers. He had never really been to Wales, but, on a 2013 trip there, he found what instantly felt like homea house built on the remains of a Roman villa, situated among broad valleys and ancient oaks, everything draped in mosses and bordered by running water. He describes it as a scene from The Lord of the Rings, and, indeed, it is not so far from Bron-Yr-Aur, where Page and Plant started many of Led Zeppelins Tolkien-inspired tunes.

OBrien was raised in an atmosphere where spirituality and religion rarely broke the surface of conversational awareness. But in this place, he began to find something like god in the woods, a belief and spirit that helped sustain him during the harrowing months that would inevitably come. As those heavy times happened, he began retreating from London to Wales more and more. He felt better there. Whats more, his writing began to bloom.

OBrien met the producer Paul Epworth because their kids went to the same school. They had tinkered around musically and most importantly, connected on a deeper level, but OBrien felt anxious about asking Epworth, who has made massive hits with the likes of Adele and Rihanna, about working together more formally. Wasnt Epworth too big a deal? When Epworth eventually told OBrien he felt the same way about him, they and engineer Riley MacIntyre began a series of weeklong sojourns together to Wales, fleshing out the fragments OBrien had started in London and slowly building these songs.

Epworth proved only the first in a series of serendipitous encounters that steadily led to Blue Morpho. Shabaka Hutchings arrived, for instance, after he and OBrien began discussing instruments tuned to 432 Hz when they met at Glastonbury. OBrien asked Hutchings if he had any flutes tuned to 432 Hz, a soothing frequency that many believe mimics the natural cycles and sounds that inspired several of OBriens songs here and that show up in many of the records field recordings. He asked Hutchings to stop by sometime and play them.

And during a trip to Estonia, OBrien ended up bonding with composer Tnu Krvits over the countrys godhead classicist, Arvo Prt; Krvits arranged the strings, played here by Estonias Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. As OBrien emerged into these songs themselves and out of the emotional miasma that had helped shape them, he began leaning into the chance of the moment, letting new experiences that felt like they were meant to happen guide him. OBrien and Epworth ultimately headed to the producers London studio, The Church, a 200-year-old sacred space responsible for some of musics landmark recordings and a fitting setting for a musician guided by his spirituality. (Old friend Flood helped sequence and connect these songs, while the great Ben Baptie mixed it.) There was a self-renewing magic in all these encounters and places, a faith rewarded.

That ethic animates Blue Morpho from end to end, framing an exquisite collage of OBriens evolving interests rather than some obdurate expectations. Opener Incantations unfurls as eight minutes of hypnotic psych-folk, OBriens gentle voice rustling like leaves in the Welsh countryside over a latticework of radiant guitars (Dave Okumu) and buoyant drums. Teachers, though, is beguiling trip-hop, with the rhythm section of Yves Fernandez and Dan See providing the fluid foundation for OBriens warped voice (with help from the great Eska). The music feels anxious and audacious, Okumus gnarled guitar finally clawing through the band like hes looking for a perch of safety.

Where Solfeggio is a luminous drone that seems to illustrate the moment when the horizon blurs as day morphs into night, Obrigado is an all-hours prayer of gratitude for struggle and salvation, for facing the dark and finding ones way through it. As lockdowns lingered, OBrien found himself much less interested in rock than during his first five decades, driven instead toward new depths of jazz by the DJ Gilles Peterson; Blue Morpho feels like a map of him navigating exciting other ways to listen, work, and live.

Named for the iconic and magically iridescent butterfly OBrien first encountered in Brazil, Blue Morpho is not some grand destination for OBrien, not a finishing point. He speaks of the people with whom he made it as a new musical family, a group of compatriots he cannot wait to work with again. He is still learning how to write songs and trust the result, how to help lead a band toward his burgeoning vision. He is candid about the discrepancy between being in one of the worlds biggest bands and being one of rock musics most lauded guitarists but also being a beginner again, a new songwriter and finally starting to figure out his approach. OBrien will talk to you about faith and recovery, psychedelics and meditation, Wim Hof and wilderness, all avenues for continuing to grow. Blue Morpho is part of the same endless journeygoing in the dark, emerging from it, and recognizing that, if were living at all, there will always be more darkness to navigate not too far up ahead.

Tracklist:

1.Incantations
2.Blue Morpho
3.Sweet Spot
4.Teachers
5.Solfeggio
6.Thin Places
7.Obrigado