ED O’BRIEN
Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien is taken aback. “I never expected this, I really didn’t,” he says, telling Long Live Vinyl about his first venture into becoming a solo artist. It was a move that surprised even him, but the result is an album, Earth, that has untapped something within the musician. “I feel awakened as an artist now. I’m on a bit of a mission.”
O’Brien’s awakening came when he was living in Brazil for a short period of time. He’d taken over some gear with him, with the vague idea of making electronic music, but it wasn’t connecting. “I wasn’t getting anything back from it,” he says. “After about six or seven weeks, I wasn’t feeling it.” His head and his heart were wrestling. “I thought making electronic music was where I should be,” he says. “I felt that electronic music is the frontier of sound and that it’s where the pioneers of sound are at the moment, but what my gut was telling me was to pick that acoustic guitar up in the corner.”