Ed: I sort of stopped listening to music in that first lockdown. I’d had enough. I was suddenly aware of this extraordinary birdsong. All of the birds were so happy when our world shut down. [...] Nature was just delighted with what we were doing. I got the Merlin app so I could start identifying all of the bird sounds. We had a particularly beautiful summer in Wales and had all the windows open. I had a microphone outside to record the birds, and I realized I wanted to make a track out of birdsong.

I was also interested in sacred music that has a transcendence within. Jeff Buckley, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis all had that same connection with the divine. I listened to A Love Supreme a lot because I wanted to understand and feel John’s connection and his strength. Spirit of Eden, by Talk Talk, is an amazing record and I leant into that a bit. But I was really interested in Coltrane. I was inspired by a lot of Brazilian jazz, people like Jorge Ben and Joyce Moreno. I also listened to a lot of classical music.

Ed: Paul Epworth [...] rang me up before we got into the studio, and we had this conversation for an hour. We had three days in this amazing studio of a church. I didn’t want to say, “Oh, I’d love to make a record with you,” because he’s Paul Epworth and he’s working with big artists. And if it’s not big artists, he’s working with people like Arlo Parks who are on the way up. I thought someone of his stature wouldn’t want to be involved with a side project of someone who had been in Radiohead. So a few weeks went by and I called him up and said, “Should we go for coffee?” I laid it out. “Paul, I’d love to work with you.” And he said, “I’d love to do exactly the same.” I couldn’t believe it.

Ed: Philip Selway plays drums on “Sweet Spot” and “Blue Morpho.” I just felt they needed Phil. He’s such a beautiful drummer — he always brings his full heart and soul to everything he does. So I asked him, “Do you fancy coming along?” He came for an afternoon and absolutely nailed it. Colin Greenwood played bass on “Brasil” from my first record. You ask because you want them to play on it, not because it’s some big deal or a marketing purpose.

Your bio mentions that you and Paul Epworth, who produced the new album, connected on a deeper level. Was it related to some of these epiphanies you were having, or what was that about?

O’BRIEN: With Paul, you know when you meet people who you immediately feel like you know them? We had a phone call before we'd ever met. We were dads with kids at the same school. His kids are a bit younger — quite a lot younger, about 10, 12 years younger. But we had a mutual friend, and someone put us in touch. And I obviously knew about Paul because he's one of the most famous and renowned producers in the world. And we just had this conversation. He phoned me up, and we were on the phone for an hour and a half. It goes like that. We connected, and it was so beautiful. He’s not only an incredible producer, he writes as well, which I've never had before. I've never worked with a producer who writes. Because he's kind of from the new vanguard. I worked with Flood, who was amazing, who's obviously a legend. Obviously Nigel Godrich. But they were from a different era. Paul is in that producer-songwriter thing.
So it was really great for me, made the songs more robust, that we could bounce off ideas. And also Riley MacIntyre, who I must mention as well. He sort of co-produced and engineered the record. He started off as Paul's assistant and sort of struck out on his own with Ezra Collective and producing all sorts of stuff, amazing stuff. So with Paul and Riley, I had these really beautiful human beings who are deeply talented. It doesn't get better than that — talented, lovely human beings.

It sounds like you put together a whole band for these sessions, a unit that you hope to keep together. Were these fresh connections or people that you've been hoping to work with for a long time?

O’BRIEN: Well, these are basically Dave Okumu. David Okumu put this band together. Lots of people call him Dave, but I call him David. David played on my first record and was like a brother. We were thinking, “OK, we need to take these songs out of my studio — Paul, Riley, and I, the three of us — and into a band context, some of them.
David did a show at the Roundhouse in Camden in London here with his band, 7 Generations. And it was extraordinary. And I contacted him the next day. We put a band together, and basically, it's his 7 Gens band. So they already had this chemistry. And David did some extra arranging. We had three what I consider sort of utopian days of recording. These guys turned up, they knew what they were doing. I mean, “Obrigado,” we did the end section, which was a big moment. We did two takes, and I think it was the very first take. We had the first take done, and then we just did another one, but it was amazing.
We recorded at Paul's studio called the Church, which is like a church, a very sacred space. It was an old church. And, yeah, it was beautiful. Really, really, really powerful. Very powerful and emotional time.

At the film première, you also mentioned the period between 1968 and 1974 speaking to you recently.

It’s really interesting, particularly Charles Stepney (1931−1976), the arranger [and producer]. He worked on Earth, Wind & Fire records, the Minnie Riperton record ‘Les Fleur’. There’s something about that music – it’s beautiful, it’s spiritual, it’s psychedelic. It’s got amazing arrangements and beautiful, beautiful vocals. There was a lot of cross-pollination going on at that time. Miles Davis goes electric in that period in In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. I love the sound of those records.

People like Inflo – who worked with Danger Mouse and did the Kiwanuka stuff – I felt like they were alluding that time sonically, because there’s a slight distortion in the recordings. There’s what you call a saturation. In digital music it can be super clean. To me, the saturation – the analogue sound – it’s like the earth on the ground. The digital sound is like a perfect kind of composite material that’s super flat and perfect and clean. I’m not interested in that. I like the earth. I want to be barefoot in the earth with the mud in between my toes. I wanted something dark, visceral and untidy.